By Nate Raymond
April 17 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday rejected the U.S. Department of Justice’s bid to force Rhode Island to turn over non-public data on nearly 750,000 registered voters so the Trump administration could probe “election integrity” in the Democratic-led state.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy in Providence marked the latest in a series of legal setbacks for the Justice Department’s efforts after judges ruled against its similar requests in California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Oregon.
The Justice Department under President Donald Trump had sued 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter files that contain their driver’s license numbers and last four digits of their Social Security numbers, saying such data is needed to probe their compliance with federal election laws.
McElroy called the request to Rhode Island “unprecedented” and concluded the department lacked authority under the National Voter Registration Act or the Help America Vote Act “to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump, a Republican, has long pushed the false claim that his 2020 election defeat to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread voter fraud.
The Justice Department says it aims to ensure states maintain accurate voter lists and is already identifying duplicate and deceased voters using nonpublic voter registration data in its possession.
It filed the case before McElroy in December, after Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore, a Democrat, offered to provide a copy of the state’s publicly available voter registration list but declined to provide unredacted data.
Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s voting section, during a March 26 hearing said the Trump administration wanted that information to ensure Rhode Island’s voter list is “clean” and flag anyone who should be purged.
That process, he said, would include sharing data with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to have it confirm if registered voters are citizens.
The Justice Department relied on a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to demand the voting-related records, a legal authority that McElroy said was intended to allow the government to detect voting-related racial discrimination.
She said that while the law does not limit its application to examining discrimination, the department must provide a factual basis for why it needs voting records, which it did not give in Rhode Island’s case.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Nia Williams)
