A United States federal appeals court has ruled in favor of the Administration of Donald Trump this Tuesday by overturning a judge’s temporary order that prevented the Government from pressuring state and local officials to discard certain votes and warned of possible related criminal actions connected to midterm elections.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals accepted on the same day of the election the Department of Justice’s request to halt the order issued last Friday by district judge Trina Thompson, which prohibited the Trump administration from “threatening” or “intimidating” officials in charge of election administration.
As the US news agency Bloomberg reports, Thompson had temporarily blocked that the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security require election officials in any state to “separate ballots, remove voters from voter rolls, or halt the processing of the same.”
The magistrate acted after a lawsuit filed by a coalition of unions and civil rights organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, which argue that the Government’s action violates the Voting Rights Act and constitutes an “unconstitutional intrusion into state control over election administration.”
The conflict stems from a data-matching operation driven by the Department of Homeland Security, which cross-references state voter rolls with federal databases. Various election officials denounce that the lists of alleged noncitizens compiled by this Department lack reliability.
The Administration argues that this strategy is intended to prevent noncitizens from participating in the elections. In this context, the Government has warned that it could prosecute election officials for “not doing enough to prevent illegal voting.”