A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered the Trump administration to halt, immediately, its pressure campaign on the officials who run America's elections. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson issued a sweeping emergency restraining order on Friday evening barring the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from demanding that election officials anywhere in the country segregate ballots, remove voters from the rolls or stop processing ballots — and from threatening those officials with criminal prosecution over how they handle disputes about voter qualifications.
The order runs through November 16, covering the whole count. It also reaches backwards: the administration must notify the officials who received its earlier threats that a court has now blocked them, and it must tell the court about any search-warrant applications, grand jury subpoenas or other demands for election materials tied to its lists of allegedly ineligible voters.
The case was brought in the Northern District of California by labor unions and civil-rights groups, among them the NAACP and LULAC, against the administration's campaign against alleged noncitizen voting — the drive in which federal officials have pressed states over ballots cast by people the government says were never eligible to vote, beginning with California's election officials.
The administration had not publicly answered the order in the reporting through Saturday morning.
For voters, the practical meaning is immediate: the local officials who count the ballots on Tuesday now do so under a court's protection. Their states' rolls and ballot handling cannot be reordered in the middle of the count by federal demand, and the officials themselves cannot be menaced with prosecution for following their own states' procedures. The underlying fight — how far the federal government may go in policing the voter rolls — is only paused, not settled: the order expires on November 16, and the case behind it continues.
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