US judge blocks election conditions attached to anti-terror grants
A federal judge has stopped the Trump administration from making counterterrorism grants to state and local governments conditional on adopting preferred election measures. The ruling says the Federal Emergency Management Agency was not authorised to use the grants for election administration reforms.
A US federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from conditioning counterterrorism grants to state and local governments on changes to election administration. US District Judge Amir Ali, sitting in Washington, ruled in favour of counties and cities in Texas, Ohio and Tennessee that challenged the policy. The decision is the latest judicial setback to President Donald Trump’s effort to increase federal influence over elections before the November 3 midterm elections.
The Department of Homeland Security had announced that it would withhold 20 per cent of funding under grant programmes related to preparation for terrorist attacks and other threats unless recipients adopted election measures favoured by the administration. The programmes involved total about US$1.1bn and had existed for years. The source material says none had been specifically designed for election security.
Ali wrote that Congress had not authorised the use of the programmes to require election administration reforms. The judge said the measures demanded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were not intended to prepare for or respond to acts of terrorism. The conditions would have required grant recipients to use equipment accepting hand-marked paper ballots, manually audit at least 5 per cent of ballots and compare voter rolls with a Department of Homeland Security database to identify possible non-citizen registrations.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin had said the requirements would protect election systems from foreign interference and cyberattacks. The DHS and Justice Department, which represents the federal government in court, did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to the supplied report. A separate coalition of mostly Democratic-governed states has filed another legal challenge to the policy, and that case remains pending.
Trump has repeatedly made false claims about widespread fraud in US elections, including the 2020 presidential election, which he lost. The source material says independent studies and audits have found voter fraud to be rare. Ali’s order prevents the administration from enforcing the disputed conditions against the local governments involved in the case.
This independently written report is based on information supplied by the named publisher. Vertrix News has not independently verified the source report.