DOJ claims California lawsuit not barred by court order

The Department of Justice (DOJ) claimed its recent California lawsuit to block the state from counting ballots from 20,000 people it suspects are noncitizens does not violate a previous court order for one simple reason: It was merely acting on findings from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The DOJ’s argument comes in response to a claim from the pro-voting group Common Cause, which previously sued to stop the administration’s broad effort to build a national voter database with private data from every state. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan barred Trump’s DOJ from carrying out its “list maintenance project,” which sought to obtain Americans’ confidential voter information and compare that against federal immigration data to cull state voter rolls.

Common Cause said the DOJ’s recent California actions violated Sooknanan’s court order and asked to hold a status conference on the matter.  

DOJ’s response: We don’t need a conference because we were merely acting on DHS’s findings. 

The department said its recent California lawsuit “cannot be construed as part of the same purported policy that this Court vacated,” — and even claimed that the voter list maintenance project Sooknanan blocked doesn’t exist.

Because, as DOJ argued, its recent actions in the Golden State stemmed from DHS’s “independent analysis under its own authority based on a voter roll that it received through a lawful purchase,” which then resulted in DHS’s lawsuit against California.

In response to the department’s nationwide voter roll grab, Common Cause sued the department in April, arguing that its effort amounts to an attempt to federalize voter list maintenance. On Oct. 9, Sooknanan said the DOJ unlawfully exceeded its authority and violated privacy laws and blocked the DOJ from continuing its voter roll project. 

Common Cause wasn’t the only one to claim the DOJ violated a court order.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D) made a similar claim in response to the DOJ last week. 

“In that order, the court vacated the DOJ’s policy of, among other things, comparing state voter roll information ‘against a federal database to identify purportedly ineligible voters,’ in collaboration with DHS, ‘and demanding that states remove voters from their rolls based on the results of those comparisons,’” Weber said. “It appears that your letter may utilize a policy that a federal court has already deemed unlawful.”

Pro-voting intervenors in the DOJ’s recent California lawsuit also made a similar claim. 

But the DOJ held firm that they did no such thing since the basis of the lawsuit came from a DHS — not DOJ — investigation.

“To be part of the supposedly ‘comprehensive effort to request the voter rolls from all states and the District of Columbia’ that this Court vacated, the California lawsuit must at least originate from the DOJ’s request for California’s voter roll,” the department said in its Monday response.