A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to stop threatening election workers with criminal prosecution, four days before Americans vote. The NAACP is one of the plaintiffs who asked for it.
U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson of the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order on Friday. It bars the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from demanding that officials remove people from voter rolls, deny ballot requests to some voters, or set aside ballots from people the government suspects are ineligible. It also bars them from threatening election workers with prosecution for processing ballots as state and federal law require. The order runs until Nov. 16.
The lawsuit was brought by unions representing California election workers, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, together with the League of United Latin American Citizens and the NAACP.
The order answers a pressure campaign. The Justice Department sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning of possible prosecution, including for failing to preserve election records. A week earlier it sent similar letters to every county in California, demanding they work with federal officials to identify suspected noncitizens on their rolls. In court, the department asked another federal judge, David Carter, to stop California and Los Angeles County from counting mail ballots from roughly 20,000 people on a federal list of “likely noncitizens” until their citizenship was verified. Carter refused on Oct. 28, finding the department probably lacks standing and a legal basis, and that its request would likely conflict with the National Voter Registration Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the ruling showed a “two-track system of justice” and that the department would review the order and weigh its options, as Newsweek reported.
Why this lands on Black voters is a matter of history and of mechanics. Purges and criminal threats have been tools against Black participation since Reconstruction, and the people who feel them first are rarely the ones the government says it is after. A list of 20,000 “likely” noncitizens is a list built by matching records, and matching errors fall on voters whose names, addresses and paperwork are hardest to match. Election workers, including the Black poll workers and clerks who run precincts in Black neighborhoods, are the ones told to carry out the purge or risk a prosecutor’s letter.
That is why the NAACP is in the case. A voter who is wrongly flagged does not learn it from a court filing. They learn it at the counter, or when a ballot is never counted.
Two federal judges have now told the department it cannot do this on the eve of an election. A third, in Alaska, threw out a Justice Department attempt to delay certification of that state’s Senate race on Sunday. The pattern is the department’s, not the courts’. It keeps asking to change who counts, days before the count.
The temporary order expires Nov. 16, and the department has not said whether it will appeal. Polls open Tuesday.
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