‘DOJ Cannot Run Roughshod Over Longstanding Laws’
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise! We are starting off with some good news for a change — and, potentially, the end of one of the Trump Justice Department’s egregious overreach campaigns. For now.
In case you missed the news, late last week U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan shut down the DOJ’s months-long campaign to collect sensitive voter data from the states and run it through the Department of Homeland Security’s flawed federal database, the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.
In her 78-page ruling, Sooknanan said that the DOJ’s efforts to access unredacted voter files from states and then run those files through the SAVE system violated federal law, specifically the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Production Act. Sooknanan’s decision goes further than the actions taken by federal judges that have rejected the DOJ’s legal arguments in several individual state-by-state cases. Her ruling suspends the DOJ’s nationwide voter roll crusade, invalidating what the DOJ has called its “list maintenance project.”
“DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” she wrote.
“And to state the obvious, the Court’s decision does not pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections,” the order adds. “Rather, the Court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more—a policy that flies in the face of duly enacted laws designed to protect Americans.”
Sooknanan noted in her ruling that the SAVE database, which the federal government is attempting to use as a way to purge supposed ineligible voters from the voter rolls, is “plagued with inaccuracies.”
“This policy, the Plaintiffs contend, has left untold numbers of disenfranchised voters in its wake and inflicted injuries to the Plaintiffs’ privacy and informational rights to boot,” she wrote.
As we have reported before, the SAVE database was originally developed as an immigration tool, and was managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to verify citizenship status for people applying for certain governmental benefits. Last year, however, DHS, in response to Trump’s March 25, 2025 executive order, expanded the use of the database to be used as a way to purge supposed noncitizens from states’ voter rolls. There are major privacy issues with using the SAVE database in this way, but there is also, as Sooknanan pointed out, evidence that the database is incorrectly flagging eligible voters as ineligible.
The DOJ’s voter roll crusade, which began last year, relied on provisions from the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA), neither of which give the federal government the right to demand sensitive voter information like drivers licenses and social security numbers from states.
Eighteen states have complied with the DOJ’s demand for voter roll data. The DOJ has sued the 31 states that have not and has lost every case, with the exception of one that reached a settlement with the DOJ. Some experts say the ruling could have implications for the states that voluntarily handed their data over to the DOJ, as well.
Election Denialism Is Indeed a ‘Core Belief’ of the MAGA Movement, Steve Bannon Says
MAGA broadcaster and former adviser to President Donald Trump Steve Bannon has admitted what we all know to be true: the MAGA movement is, in part, built on 2020 election conspiracy theories.
On Sunday, Bannon said a number of troubling things during a CBS interview with Ted Koppel, but most strikingly, he declared that the “core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election.”
Bannon, who has been at the forefront of 2020 election conspiracies for many years now, asserted repeatedly that Trump won the 2020 election, despite Koppel correcting him over and over.
“That’s not true,” Bannon responded. “We can go debate this another time, but we didn’t have standing. We never even got into court.”
Bannon also told Koppel that he is “the leader of trying to get President Trump to run for a third term,” but said it “appears that he’s not interested or it just won’t happen.”
And when Koppel reminded Bannon that the 22nd Amendment bars presidents from serving more than two terms, Bannon simply responded by saying, “Oh, I think you could drive a truck through that amendment.”
“I talked to constitutional lawyers, and there were, I think, a number of different alternatives,” he added. “Would it be contested? Yeah, it’d be contested, because everything [Trump] does is contested in the courts.”
Checking in on Some of the Most Notorious Election Deniers
Tina Peters and Cleta Mitchell are at it again with new election interference schemes — just in time for the midterms.
Let’s start with Tina Peters, the former Mesa County, Colorado elections administrator who was convicted for breaching her own office’s voting equipment in a bizarre quest to somehow materialize evidence of 2020 voter fraud for Trump. Peters reportedly met with Trump last week at the White House to discuss “election integrity” plans ahead of the midterms. (Yes, the president meeting with election conspiracy theorist Peters to discuss election integrity is completely insane.)
Peters, who was convicted for her election conspiracy work, has been hard at work on election integrity plans of her own. On her website, Peters recently published the “The Tina Plan,” outlining her recommendations for 2026 election security, including things like expanding hand-marked paper ballots, a favorite vote-counting method for election deniers, particularly those caught up in conspiracy theories about voting machines.
Peters is also working with fellow election conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell to get the U.S. Department of Commerce to try to force some sort of partial hand count of ballots this fall, per reporting from Votebeat.
If this sounds like an absurd proposition that’s because it is.
David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former attorney in the Voting Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, called it an “effort that’s disconnected from reality.”
“It’s of course troubling that conspiracy theorists like Cleta Mitchell and convicted felons like Tina Peters have access to the president with complete disinformation about our election process,” Becker said in an interview with me.
“But that being said, it’s not resulting in anything. I mean, if the president was going to do something, wouldn’t he have done it already?” he said. “The Department of Commerce has no legal authority over the voting machines that states use.”
Becker added that even if the federal government were to forbid the states from using voting machines, the action would be blocked by the courts immediately and the states would respond by saying that states run elections, and not the federal government.
In Other Election News
The New York Times: Trump Has Cast Doubt on Elections on 440 Days in His Second Term
Votebeat: Voting rights groups sue Texas over failure to process more than 500,000 voter registrations
Democracy Docket: North Carolina sends vague letter to voters flagged by citizenship database
'DOJ Cannot Run Roughshod Over Longstanding Laws’
Well no shit Sherlock
Trump appeal on line 1.
If the “core belief” of MAGA was the 2020 election - then what was its belief leading up to 2016, when MAGA first gained office?
No, the core belief of MAGA at the time was revanchism: the desire to “undo” the result of the Civil War, to “make America great again” by reliving the heydays of slavery and treating non-white people as property to be used at will. The victors of that war never finished the crucial task of Reconstruction, and MAGA is and always has been the badge of the Redeemers.
All of this seems so petty. The chance of finding a non-US citizen voting has got to be rarer than hen’s teeth. I would never say that a mistake couldn’t happen, but it is in the numbers that Trumpers are claiming is totally ridiculous.
Hey, MAGAts, remember your advocacy for states’ rights?? Hypocritical, power hungry slobs!