By Luc Cohen
Nov 2 (Reuters) – A federal judge ordered President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday to stop demanding that California election officials segregate ballots cast by people on the US government’s lists of suspected noncitizens.
US District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling in Washington marked the latest legal defeat for the administration’s pressure campaign on states over alleged noncitizen voting on the eve of the midterm elections. Trump’s fellow Republicans are battling to maintain control of Congress.
In a lawsuit, an immigrant rights group challenged the Justice Department’s authority to threaten county-level election officials in California with legal action for failing to review lists of possible noncitizens and to remove them from their voter rolls.
The group, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said the administration’s actions threatened to unlawfully disenfranchise recently naturalized US citizens, given the possibility that they could be incorrectly identified as noncitizens.
Boasberg agreed that the lists the administration had compiled were flawed. The judge also said the Justice Department was acting outside the scope of its legal authority, since the US Constitution assigns the role of administering federal elections to the states.
“California may decide for itself what procedures to use for verifying the citizenship of registered voters,” wrote Boasberg, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama. “The executive branch lacks authority to unilaterally impose its preferred procedures.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A judge in a separate case last week declined to block California from counting any mail ballots received from anyone on a list of 20,000 people who the Justice Department said may not be citizens. The Justice Department asked the US Supreme Court on Monday to intervene in that case after a lower court upheld the judge’s ruling.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York;Editing by Noeleen Walder and Will Dunham)
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