Judge Strikes Down DOJ Voter Rolls Policy: What It Means for the Midterms

Anthony Nel did everything a voter is supposed to do. He registered in Denton County, Texas, and showed up. Then in October 2025 a letter told him a federal database had flagged him as a noncitizen, and he had 30 days to prove otherwise or lose his registration. His passport had expired. By the time the renewal came through about two months later, he had already been dropped from the rolls.

Nel is a U.S. citizen. His registration was eventually restored. But he became one of four named plaintiffs in a lawsuit that, on Friday, brought down one of the Trump administration’s signature election-integrity programs, just weeks before Americans vote in the midterms.

Here is what the judge decided, what the Justice Department was trying to do, the best case on each side, and what happens next.

What the Judge Ruled

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia issued a 78-page opinion on Oct. 9 vacating the Justice Department’s Voter List Maintenance Policy. Under that policy, the department’s Civil Rights Division demanded unredacted voter rolls from states, shared them with the Department of Homeland Security, ran the names through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE, and urged states to remove people the system flagged.

Sooknanan found the policy went beyond anything Congress authorized. According to CBS News, she held that it violated both the Administrative Procedure Act and the Privacy Act, and she wrote that the department “cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people.” On the core question of who controls voter lists, she was blunt: “Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.”

She also took aim at the tool itself. Courthouse News Service reported that the opinion accused the department of downplaying “the risk of voter disenfranchisement despite knowingly relying on an inaccurate database,” and described the policy as “the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote.”

Importantly, the ruling vacates the policy outright rather than just blocking it for the plaintiffs. That means it reaches the voter files the department already collected from cooperating states, as well as files still tied up in litigation.

Who Sued, and Why

The case was brought in April by the advocacy group Common Cause along with four individual voters: Anthony Nel, Haley Smith, Linda Duckworth and Ruth Nasrullah. Each says their registration was canceled after their state handed its voter roll to the Justice Department.

Their central argument was simple. SAVE was built to check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits, not to audit every registered voter in America. Critics say it is especially error-prone for naturalized citizens, people who were born abroad and later became Americans, because their records may not be updated across agencies. A February 2026 analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, cited in the case coverage, described “persistent mistakes” in the system.

The rolls the department sought also contain sensitive data, including home addresses, voting history and, in many states, partial or full Social Security numbers. That is where the Privacy Act claim came in.

Common Cause President and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón called the decision “a victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice.”

What the Justice Department Was Trying to Do

To understand the other side, start with the policy’s roots. In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to help states verify the citizenship of registered voters and to prioritize enforcement of election laws. The Justice Department followed by requesting complete, unredacted voter rolls from 49 states and the District of Columbia.

The department’s legal theory leaned on several statutes. The National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act both require states to run programs that keep voter lists accurate, and both give the department power to sue states that fall short. The department also pointed to the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which requires election officials to preserve certain records and produce them on a proper written demand. A Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion issued in May concluded those laws allowed both the data requests and the data sharing with Homeland Security.

The department’s argument in court, as summarized by CBS News, was that it cannot confirm states are obeying federal list-maintenance laws without seeing the full lists.

The response from the states split along familiar lines. According to the judge, 18 states cooperated fully. Most of the rest refused, and the department sued them. It has not gone well for the government: federal judges have thrown out nearly all of those suits, and one appeals court, the Sixth Circuit, upheld a dismissal. One state settled.

The Best Case for the Policy

Supporters of the program make an argument that deserves a fair hearing. Voter rolls in America are messy. People move, die and register in new states without canceling old registrations. Lists that are not maintained invite confusion, long lines and suspicion, and a single election decided by a few hundred votes can turn on whether ineligible names were on the rolls.

Noncitizen voting is rare, but it is not zero. In September, the Justice Department announced charges against 16 people in seven states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas and Georgia, accused of illegal voting or of falsely claiming citizenship to register, according to Votebeat. Some of those cases allegedly involved votes cast across multiple elections. To supporters, those cases show that existing state checks miss things, and that a federal cross-check is a reasonable backstop.

There is also a legal argument about the remedy. The department asked the court to limit any relief to the actual plaintiffs. Conservative commentators argue that wiping out the policy nationwide, including for states that volunteered their data, goes further than necessary, and that the Supreme Court left open in Trump v. CASA whether courts can vacate federal policies across the board under the Administrative Procedure Act. That question alone makes an appeal likely.

We covered a related fight last week when a federal judge struck down the noncitizen voting law, and the administration’s broader push on citizenship, including its move to strip citizenship from 40 people, is part of the same larger story.

The Best Case Against It

Opponents start with the Constitution. Elections in the United States are run by states and counties, and Congress has spelled out in detail what the federal government may and may not do. In their view, a federal agency collecting the personal data of tens of millions of voters and pressuring states to cut names from the rolls is exactly the kind of power the law never granted.

Second, they point to the errors. A citizen who loses a registration because a database is out of date may not find out until Election Day, when it is too late. Nel’s story, and the two eligible Texas voters reported to have lost their registrations, are the kind of cases opponents say prove the risk is real, not theoretical. Even conservative critics of the ruling, such as a PJ Media columnist, acknowledged the errors and said lawful voters must be protected.

Third, there is the scale problem. Sixteen alleged cases spread across seven states, while serious, are a tiny number compared with the more than 150 million Americans who cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election. Opponents argue the existing system, in which states maintain their own lists and prosecutors pursue specific crimes, already catches the cases that exist.

Sooknanan addressed the fear head-on. She wrote that her ruling does not “pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections,” and that it vacates a policy that had removed citizens from the rolls.

What the Ruling Does Not Do

It is easy to overread a decision like this, so here are the limits.

• States can still maintain their own voter rolls, including removing people who have died, moved or been found ineligible.
• States can still use SAVE on their own where the law allows it.
• The Justice Department can still investigate and prosecute specific election crimes, including noncitizen voting.
• The ruling is from a single district court and can be appealed.

There is a separate but related wrinkle. In June, Sooknanan ruled in another case that the overhauled SAVE system, which now draws on Social Security Administration data, had been created unlawfully. The Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling last month. That means the legal status of the database itself is still being fought over, independent of Friday’s decision.

Why the Timing Matters, and Why It Might Not

The midterms are about three weeks away. You might expect a ruling like this to upend the election. In practice, the effect this cycle may be limited. Federal law generally bars states from systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election, a quiet-period rule written into the National Voter Registration Act. We are well inside that window, so large-scale purges were largely off the table for November regardless.

Where the ruling matters most is the long game. The data the department already collected is now covered by the decision. Any future attempt to build a national voter-verification system will have to clear the legal bar Sooknanan set, or win on appeal. And the dispute adds to a crowded election-law docket, including issues the Supreme Court is weighing this term.

What Happens Next

A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the decision. An appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is the obvious next step, and the remedy question, whether a judge can vacate a federal policy nationwide, could eventually land in front of the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the department’s lawsuits against states that refused to hand over their lists remain on a losing streak, and the SAVE case is still alive at the high court.

The plain-spoken takeaway is this. Both sides say they want the same thing: clean rolls and only eligible voters casting ballots. The fight is over who gets to do the checking and how much error is acceptable along the way. For now, a federal judge has answered that the states do the checking, and that a database with known mistakes is not a lawful shortcut. The next court will decide whether she got it right.