Pennsylvania Judge Obliterates Trump's Demand For State's Voter Data
Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon went beyond denying the Trump DOJ's request for Pennsylvania's voter data. She completely destroyed it.
In every single state where the DOJ has sued to get access to voter data, they have lost. The two most recent states to defeat Trump are New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.
The defeat in Pennsylvania was especially stinging because Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon lit into the administration in her ruling.
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Chief Judge Bissoon wrote:
What hypothetical grounds are there, now, for executive incursion? The question goes to the heart of things.
The government all but concedes: its best legal argument lies, ironically, in the Civil
Rights Act. Under it, the Attorney General may demand review of “any record or paper . . .retained and preserved” under the Act, so long as the demand “contain[s] a statement of the basis and the purpose therefor.” It is on this ground ‒ a statute enacted to combat systemic racism against black citizens ‒ the executive’s fate lies.
Unredacted voter files are not “records,” as the term is defined under Title III of the Act. Benson at *4-5. The files are subject to additions, subtraction and revisions. The NVRA and HAVA require them. In light of these realities, the government’s reading does violence to Section 20702. That Section makes it a crime to “alter[]” or “destroy[]” the “records.” Id. Tortured statutory construction tends to yield such a result.
Nor does the government’s demand contain “a statement of the basis and purpose
therefore.” Now is not the time to abandon one’s penchant for “say[ing] the quiet parts out loud.”
The quiet parts do not help. Public statements from government officials reveal its
intentions: to create a nationwide voter-database, for potential weaponization in future elections; as a “fishing expedition,” hoped to advance unsubstantiated claims of non-citizen voting; and as a tool for immigration enforcement.) (“it appears that DOJ is on a nationwide quest to gather the sensitive, private information of millions of Americans for use in a centralized federal database”; there are “numerous sources raising significant concerns about the true purpose of Plaintiff’s . . . requests across the states”; there is reason to believe “that the data [is] in fact being aggregated in part for the purposes of immigration enforcement”; and Plaintiff’s “assertions that the data [is] requested for NVRA or HAVA compliance [are] pretextual”) (characterizing the DOJ’s request as a “fishing expedition”).
The judge saw through what the Trump DOJ was trying to pull and called it out. The administration wants state voter information to build a database, and any other excuse is a pretext.
To make matters worse, the judge also pointed out that the Trump DOJ sued in the wrong place.
