President Donald Trump has so far lost every single case he has brought to court in his efforts to seize states’ voter rolls, and yet despite this losing streak, he keeps trying. Now one judge — who rejected his 23rd effort — is calling out his efforts as being a “fishing expedition.”
“Like 22 of her peers before her, a federal judge in Minnesota rejected the Trump administration’s crusade for unredacted state voter rolls,” wrote Democracy Docket's Jim Saska on Monday. “In a decision Monday, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit to compel production of the sensitive voter data, like Social Security numbers and dates of birth.”
Saska added, “That gave the DOJ its 23rd trial court loss out of the 31 lawsuits the department has filed against states for unfettered access to their voter rolls.”
In addition to rejecting Trump’s claim, Judge Menendez argued that the efforts are not legitimate but instead a “fishing expedition,” with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) being a mere pretext for them.
“In other words, the government suggests it is permitted to use a civil action as a ‘fishing expedition,’” Menendez wrote in his decision. “But an ordinary litigant isn’t allowed to seek discovery first and allege a claim later, and the federal government has no special privilege to do so either.”
As Saska added, “The campaign, which has so far fared no better in appellate courts, is part of a multi-agency effort to prove President Donald Trump’s assertion that noncitizens vote illegally in large numbers — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by studies and state audits.”
In light of the administration’s failures with district courts, Attorney General Todd Blanche told NBC News on Sunday that the president is considering moving voter roll cases to the Supreme Court as a “possibility.” Speaking with Bloomberg News on Monday, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon argued that “we just got a ruling in the Sixth Circuit that had some very good language in the en banc from several very respected judges and so you may see us making a next stop at the Supreme Court on that.”
In June, Common Cause Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation Dan Vicuña argued that Trump’s ongoing efforts to nationalize local elections is illegal.
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”
