Democracy Docket reports:

In a major ruling Friday, a federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s nationwide voter roll campaign, delivering a damaging blow to the Department of Justice’s effort to obtain states’ unredacted voter rolls, compare them against federal data and pressure states to remove voters it deems ineligible.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan vacated what DOJ internally called its “list maintenance project,” finding that the department exceeded its statutory authority and violated federal law.

The ruling goes far beyond the dozens of state-by-state cases in which courts have rejected DOJ’s attempts to force election officials to turn over sensitive voter information.

Sooknanan invalidated the nationwide policy itself.

The ruling also reaches voter rolls that states voluntarily turned over. By vacating the policy itself, the court barred DOJ from continuing to use those already-obtained files as part of the nationwide program — including sharing them with DHS, running them through citizenship databases and using the results to press states to remove voters. [Continue reading…]