The US Justice Department isn\u2019t entitled to Pennsylvania\u2019s unredacted voter rolls, a federal judge ruled in the latest defeat for the Trump administration on the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnredacted voter files are not \u2018records,\u2019 as the term is defined under\u201d the Civil Rights Act of 1960, said<\/a> Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon<\/a> of the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania as she dismissed the suit with prejudice. <\/p>\n It\u2019s the administration\u2019s tenth loss in federal district court in its quest to obtain all 50 states\u2019 unredacted voter rolls. While some Republican-led states handed over their records, the administration sued 30 states to get their rolls, according to a litigation tracker<\/a> maintained by the University of Wisconsin law school\u2019s State Democracy Research Initiative.<\/p>\n Bissoon\u2019s Saturday ruling relied heavily on the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit\u2019s recent ruling in United States v. Benson<\/a>, the first voter roll case to be decided at the appellate level. In that ruling, the 2-1 panel said the Justice Department wasn\u2019t entitled to Michigan\u2019s voter rolls.<\/p>\n Since the files are not records, \u201cthe government\u2019s reading does violence to\u201d the Civil Rights Act, Bissoon said. \u201cTortured statutory construction tends to yield such a result.\u201d<\/p>\n The government also failed to demonstrate its entitlement to the rolls under complying with the National Voter Registration Act or Help America Vote Act, Bissoon said. <\/p>\n \u201cPublic statements from government officials reveal its intentions: to create a nationwide voter-database, for potential weaponization in future elections; as a \u2018fishing expedition,\u2019 hoped to advance unsubstantiated claims of non-citizen voting; and as a tool for immigration enforcement,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Neither the Justice Department nor the office of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt immediately responded to requests for comment.<\/p>\n