A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration cannot withhold emergency preparedness and antiterrorism grants from states and localities that decline to alter how they conduct elections.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali of the District of Columbia vacated conditions that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had attached to the Homeland Security Grant Program.
In a notice of funding opportunity, FEMA stated it would hold back up to 20 percent of the grants, which total roughly $1 billion to $1.1 billion annually, unless recipients demonstrated they were exploring or implementing specific election-administration measures.
Those measures included transitioning to equipment that accepts hand-marked paper ballots (and submitting a plan with timeline and potential funding request to eliminate certain electronic systems that use bar codes or QR codes), verifying the citizenship of registered voters and poll workers against a Department of Homeland Security database, and conducting manual audits of at least 5 percent of ballots.
Local governments in Texas, Tennessee, and Ohio sued FEMA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. They argued the conditions exceeded FEMA’s statutory authority, were unrelated to preparing for or responding to acts of terrorism, and risked disenfranchising eligible voters.
Judge Ali, a Biden appointee, agreed that the conditions went beyond the agency’s power. “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,’” he wrote. He ordered the challenged election-administration conditions and the associated 20 percent holdback requirement removed from the grant process.
