Judge Sparkle puts a new block on Trump’s effort to clean dirty voter rolls in red states

Judge Sparkle Sooknanan decreed that states sharing data with the Department of Homeland Security to cross-reference their voter rolls against a database of eligible voters would violate statutes including the Privacy Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Administrative Procedure Act in doing so.

“DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” claimed the judge, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, in the edict.

Sooknanan’s spaghetti-to-the-wall approach also cited the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, all of which she claimed “do not authorize the policy.”

The US Supreme Court already ruled on several elements of the Trump administration’s policy to use the US Postal Service as an election-integrity workaround after the Senate’s failure to pass the SAVE Act.

The high court upheld a preliminary injunction in a ruling last month that argued it was too close to election season to force states to revamp their policies to meet the new postal-service requirements. Some states, including North Carolina, had already begun sending out their mail-in ballots.

That ruling, however, did not prohibit states from voluntarily cooperating with the effort to cross-check voter rolls for potentially ineligible voters.

Arizona Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh introduced impeachment articles against Sooknanan in July, alleging that she had “substitut[ed] the judgment of a single unelected judge for that of the duly elected Executive Branch” in her previous efforts to run interference against the SAVE Act.

“Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan’s egregious overreaching ruling blocking President Trump’s common-sense effort to verify the citizenship of those who want to vote in our elections was the final straw," Hamadeh said in a press release.

“This is a blatant and unlawful subversion of the President’s executive authority and a direct assault on election integrity,” he added. “Judges who weaponize their bench to interfere with the President’s constitutional duties must be held accountable.”

The watchdog group Democracy Restored also filed an ethics complaint against the judge with the Disciplinary Council for the DC Court of Appeals, which alleged (among other things) that Sooknanan had colluded with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Biden-era efforts to enforce civil-rights laws by targeting conservative organizations.