Judge Orders the Justice Department to Stop Threatening Election Officials — and the Department Appeals
A federal judge's emergency order bars the Justice Department from threatening election officials with prosecution over ballots cast by voters the administration alleges are non-citizens. The order covers officials in every state, including the Dallas and Tarrant County workers running Tuesday's election — and the department appealed it on Saturday.
Two days before Election Day, the federal government's pressure campaign on the people who run America's elections is under a court's emergency order. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson on Friday ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with the Trump administration's demands on voting by alleged non-citizens, in a lawsuit brought by election workers' unions and civil-rights groups including the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens.
The temporary restraining order, which runs to November 16, bars the administration from demanding that local officials remove voters from statewide rolls, refuse ballots to specific voters, or segregate ballots cast in the midterms, based on an administration list of alleged non-citizen voters. Thompson wrote that the administration's actions are likely to interfere with election administration and disenfranchise lawful voters, and Reuters reported her reasoning that the public has a paramount interest in election officials being able to carry out their work under federal law and procedure with the election only days away. The Justice Department had no immediate comment on the ruling, Reuters reported — and on Saturday the department appealed the order, according to CNN.
The order is nationwide, and that is the Dallas–Fort Worth angle: the Dallas County and Tarrant County election workers who will distribute, process and count ballots on Tuesday do that work under the same protection the judge described — administering the election according to law does not become a federal crime because a ballot belongs to a voter the administration alleges is ineligible. How the appeal moves, and whether any higher court acts before Tuesday, is the file to watch.
