A federal judge ruled the Justice Department's collection of state voter rolls illegal on Oct 9. Will the DOJ appeal by Oct 23?
83% of users predicted YES — the community got this one right. 6 predictions cast.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled on October 9 that the Justice Department's year-long project to collect states' unredacted voter rolls, intended to be shared with the Department of Homeland Security to search for noncitizens, exceeded the department's legal authority and violated voter privacy protections. The order functioned as a nationwide block on the program, which DOJ had called its "list maintenance project."
The Justice Department said the same week that it would appeal the decision, and by mid-October it had done so, continuing a pattern in which the department has appealed essentially every district court loss in its voter-roll litigation rather than abandon the effort. The appeal came as the DOJ separately pressed California to purge roughly 20,000 voters it identified as possible noncitizens, prompting voting-rights groups to warn that the California action itself might violate Sooknanan's order.
The appeal's filing by October 23 matched the community's strong expectation: forecasters had put the odds of an appeal at 83%, reflecting the administration's consistent record of contesting every adverse voter-data ruling at the appellate level despite a string of losses in lower courts nationwide.