WHO DECIDES WHO VOTES
Quick question for you. Can you hold two flags at once? Flag one says “states’ rights.” Flag two says “only citizens vote.” On Friday a federal judge made both parties pick which one they actually mean.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington wrote that the Justice Department “cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people.” Her 78-page ruling struck down the DOJ’s policy of checking state voter rolls against federal immigration databases, per CBS News.
That is not a vibe tweet. It’s a district judge reminding everyone where Congress parked the authority to decide who stays on the list.
What DOJ wanted, and what the judge said
The administration has pushed to get complete voter rolls from every state, including sensitive information about registered voters. DOJ argued it needs the files to make sure states comply with the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, CBS reports.
Then came the leap: compare those lists against citizenship databases and urge states to remove people the government claims are ineligible.
Eighteen states fully cooperated, Sooknanan wrote. DOJ sued most of the rest, lost almost all of those suits, and settled with one state, per a CBS News analysis. The ruling covers files DOJ already has and files still in litigation.
Sooknanan rejected DOJ’s claimed authority to demand the lists, run them against citizenship databases and press for removals. She found the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the Privacy Act, and said the federal databases could contain “inaccuracies.”
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia, whose 78-page ruling on Oct. 9 struck down DOJ's voter-roll cross-check policy. Credit: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
She also spelled out what the ruling does not do. It “does not prevent the federal government from taking lawful steps to support states’ efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls.” It does not stop states from maintaining their own rolls. And “to state the obvious,” it “does not pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections.”
What it does, in her words: vacate “a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more.”
Then the line both parties will quote selectively: “The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote. But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.” So the question this fall isn’t only who wins. It’s WHO DECIDES WHO VOTES.
The plaintiffs and the midterm calendar
Common Cause and individual voters brought the challenge. CEO Virginia Kase Solomón called the ruling “a victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice.” DOJ said it is reviewing the decision.
The practical effect on November may be limited, CBS notes, because federal law already bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters from their lists within 90 days of an election.
The E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, home of the federal district court that struck down DOJ's voter-roll policy. Credit: AgnosticPreachersKid, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The losing streak is long. More than two dozen judges have denied DOJ requests to force states to hand over voter lists. In June, Sooknanan also ruled that the administration’s overhauled SAVE database, which now includes Social Security data, was created unlawfully; the Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling last month. Separately, the Supreme Court declined to let the administration’s new Postal Service rules for mail ballots take effect.
The red costume: states’ rights until the spreadsheet says otherwise
If your brand is federalism, this ruling should feel familiar and uncomfortable.
On abortion in April 2024, Trump said “the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” per NBC News. On elections, the product flips: federalize the who-votes question through DOJ demands, immigration-database checks and lawsuits against holdout states.
You can believe noncitizen voting is illegal, because it is, and still notice that “integrity” that needs a Washington spreadsheet override is not federalism. Eighteen cooperating states were not enough. The point was national reach.
We have watched this costume before in Armed Integrity and Integrity for Thee, Recurring for Me: integrity as the brand, overreach as the product, and rules that only apply to the other side.
If Congress left who-votes with the states, stop auditioning DOJ as a national board of elections every October.
The blue costume: list maintenance is not a slur
Democrats, don’t get cute.
You will celebrate this ruling as a civil-rights win, and parts of that are earned: the judge found the policy knocked citizens off the rolls and broke the APA and the Privacy Act. You also tend to treat any serious talk about list maintenance as a plot against your coalition.
The rolls do need work. In 2012, the Pew Center on the States estimated that about 24 million registrations, one in eight, were “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.” More than 1.8 million dead people were listed as voters, and about 2.75 million people were registered in more than one state. Pew later stressed that those errors “are not evidence of fraud at polling places.” Both halves of that are true at once.
Accurate rolls and eligible voters are not opposing values. The statutes DOJ cited exist to make states keep their lists current. Disenfranchisement alarm that can’t say “dead voters” and “duplicate registrations” in the same sentence is not a voting-rights strategy. It’s a brand.
If your midterm theory depends on the other side being the only party that plays games with election rules, read They Designed It to Fail: both parties are fluent in packaging that looks like reform and works like sabotage.
Both costumes
Here is the boring center neither jersey wants on a yard sign. Noncitizens can’t vote. Fraud should be prosecuted when it exists. States run elections. Congress wrote the statutes on list maintenance and privacy, and a judge just said DOJ’s cross-check-and-pressure policy ran over them. The 90-day rule already limits purges before November.
The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, March 31, 2026. DOJ said it needed state voter files to enforce HAVA and the NVRA; the court said the policy went further than the law allows. Credit: APK, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The red costume is federalism for thee and a national voter file for me. The blue costume is “democracy dies” whenever a list gets cleaned and “nothing to see” when the list is full of people who moved or died.
Own one standard: state-run rolls, lawful maintenance, real privacy limits and evidence-based fraud enforcement, with no Washington shortcut that treats the electorate like a database upload.
Ask your secretary of state one question this week: who decides who stays on your roll, and under which statute? If the answer starts with “the attorney general in Washington,” you don’t have federalism. You have a national board of elections with a states’-rights bumper sticker.
Receipts
- CBS News, Oct. 9, 2026. Sooknanan’s 78-page ruling; “run roughshod”; 18 cooperating states; DOJ’s suit record; APA and Privacy Act; “inaccuracies”; full “with the states” passage; Common Cause; 90-day limit; SAVE ruling and pause; more than two dozen judges; USPS mail-rules block.
- NBC News, April 8, 2024. Trump on abortion: “the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both.”
- Pew Center on the States, Feb. 14, 2012 and Pew, Oct. 18, 2016. 24 million inaccurate registrations; 1.8 million deceased; 2.75 million in more than one state; “not evidence of fraud at polling places.”
- Earlier Hypocrisy Democracy: They Designed It to Fail, Integrity for Thee, Recurring for Me and Armed Integrity.
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Originally published on Substack.