COURT: ADMINISTRATION CANNOT TIE FEMA GRANTS TO "ELECTION SECURITY"

By Casey He
Politico

A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot condition anti-terrorism funds to state and local governments on how they administer elections.

Judge Amir Ali of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday sided with local governments in Texas, Ohio and Tennessee. They sued the Department of Homeland Security after the department said it would withhold 20 percent of grant money from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, until the local governments complied with a set of election security requirements.

The requirements, announced earlier this year, would mandate the governments to compare their voter rolls to a DHS citizenship database and manually audit at least 5 percent of the ballots cast. They also call for the use of voting systems that accept hand-marked ballots.

“Congress did not authorize the grant program to be used for the sort of election administration reforms FEMA demands here — changes that, whether sound or not as a matter of policy, are not advanced to prepare for or respond to ‘acts of terrorism,’” Ali wrote in his decision.

"The safety and security of our communities should never be used as a bargaining chip for partisan politics," said Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones in a statement responding to the ruling. "These critical dollars keep our law enforcement officers equipped, firefighters trained, and Harris County prepared for the worst."

In announcing the new requirements, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said they will “preserve election integrity and ensure that Americans can trust the results.” The grants, which total about $1 billion per year, have helped to pay for physical security, cybersecurity and training for terrorism preparedness.

Congressional Democrats have slammed DHS over the efforts, which they say amount to election interference. In a letter to Mullin last week, nearly three dozen Democratic senators called on the secretary to release the FEMA grant money and drop his claims about noncitizen voting.

“Your unsubstantiated allegations of noncitizen voter fraud, public recitation of unreliable data, and unwarranted conditioning of continued grant funding for state election security measures on compliance with politically motivated requests for voter data appear to be calculated efforts to undermine confidence in our elections and risks wrongly disenfranchising voters,” the senators wrote.

The court decision marks the federal government’s latest defeat in pursuit of President Donald Trump's plan to revamp election administration just weeks ahead of the midterms. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked the administration from overhauling voting by mail, which the president has long claimed, without proof, to be riddled with fraud.

Still, the same court last week allowed states to use the DHS database of citizenship records, known as SAVE, in the midterm elections.

DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Department of Justice, which represented the government in court, declined to comment.