A federal judge in Washington ruled Monday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot make counterterrorism grants depend on election changes. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali vacated the conditions and the 20% funding holdback that came with them, Law&Crime reported.
The Brennan Center for Justice, which helped represent the plaintiffs, said the court granted summary judgment on Sept. 28. The ruling came weeks before the November midterm elections.
What FEMA required and what the judge ruled
FEMA told states and local governments in June that they had to adopt election measures or lose part of their Urban Area Security Initiative and State Homeland Security Grant Program money. The measures included moving from electronic voting to hand-marked paper ballots, post-election audits of 5% of ballots and citizenship checks of voters and election personnel, the National Desk reported.
Law&Crime reported that FEMA issued the notice of funding in June. The Brennan Center said the conditions also required use of the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system. The National Desk also listed reconciling voter counts with ballots cast.
Ali wrote that the election changes “fall well outside of preparing for or responding to” acts of terrorism. According to the ruling as quoted by the Brennan Center, the statute lets FEMA fund projects that states and high-risk urban areas propose. It does not let the agency use the possibility of grants to push its preferred projects “at their own expense.”
Law&Crime reported that Ali said the court “does not pass judgment on the soundness or importance of” the election decisions at issue. He ruled on whether Congress authorized FEMA to attach them. The National Desk reported that the judge found FEMA had not shown how the election requirements relate to counterterrorism.
How the conditions grew from one year to the next
The conditions did not start with the June announcement. In a Sept. 25 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, 34 senators led by Gary Peters, Alex Padilla and Richard Durbin described two steps. For fiscal 2025 grants, they wrote, FEMA required that 3% of target allocations go to election security. For fiscal 2026, the administration tied 20% of the full grant amount to compliance with election requirements.
The senators called the effort an “illegal attempt to federalize the administration of the upcoming midterm elections”. They also wrote that DHS made “unsubstantiated allegations of noncitizen voter fraud.” The letter demanded that DHS stop immediately and set no date for a response. The two rates matter to the arithmetic. Moving from 3% to 20% multiplies the share of a grant tied to election policy by about 6.7 (20 divided by 3).
Six local governments sued
Ali ruled in a suit that the plaintiffs filed against FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, arguing the agencies lacked authority to dictate election procedures. Six jurisdictions brought the case, the Brennan Center said. Five are Nashville-Davidson Metropolitan Government and the Texas counties of Harris, El Paso, Travis and Dallas.
The sixth is the city of Columbus, Ohio. Protect Democracy, the Brennan Center, Jacobson Lawyers Group and the Public Rights Project were among their lawyers. Suits were filed in August, UPI reported. Local attorneys responded in statements the Brennan Center published. Zach Klein, the Columbus city attorney, said Columbus law enforcement will now see the funding with “no political strings attached.”
Christina Sanchez, the El Paso County attorney, called conditioning the money on an “unproven” citizenship system “reckless.” Abbie Kamin, the Harris County attorney, said the court agreed that holding public safety funding hostage was “dangerous and illegal.”
Tyler Yarbro, Nashville’s director of law, said the city does not need Washington dictating the terms of the security money its residents depend on. Delia Garza, the Travis County attorney, said her office would keep defending local jurisdictions’ right to run their own elections. John Creuzot, the Dallas County attorney, said the federal government has “no right to threaten the public safety or election authority of our county.”
Reports differ on who filed. The National Desk report carried by KFOX described Ohio’s capital and counties in Texas and Tennessee as plaintiffs. The Brennan Center’s list names Nashville, a city-county government, along with the Texas counties and Columbus.
How much money was at stake
UPI reported that the grants typically run $1 billion to $2 billion a year. A 20% cut of $1 billion is $200 million. At $2 billion it is $400 million. Those figures are the most the holdback could have removed from a year’s grants, based on UPI’s range.
A separate case shows the same conditions in dollars. A complaint filed July 23 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, posted by the California attorney general, challenges the election conditions on behalf of 23 states and the District of Columbia, including Illinois and California. It lists more than $740 million in Homeland Security Grant Program money and more than $460 million in Urban Area Security
Initiative money. Twenty percent of $740 million is $148 million, and 20% of $460 million is $92 million. The complaint says states would have had to check the citizenship of people in voter databases within 120 days of accepting the grant award. That case is separate from Ali’s ruling, which covers the six local plaintiffs before him.
The SAVE system and the timing
SAVE is the same federal database at the center of another ruling days earlier. On Sept. 25 the Supreme Court issued an unsigned order that paused a lower court’s June ruling against the expanded SAVE system while the appeals continue, with Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissenting, Votebeat reported.
DHS General Counsel James Percival posted on X that the department had to file an emergency petition just to use government data to help states stop noncitizens from voting illegally. Abigail Kunkler, an attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the decision “profoundly disappointing.”
The two rulings address different questions. The Supreme Court’s order concerned whether the government could keep using the expanded data system while appeals continue. Ali’s ruling concerned whether FEMA could use grant money to make local governments adopt it. Votebeat reported that federal law bars systematic voter removals within 90 days of an election, which limits the Supreme Court order’s effect on the November midterms.
What the government said
The National Desk quoted Victoria Barton, associate administrator in FEMA’s Office of External Affairs, as saying “Election security is national security”, and another version of its report carried by KFOX said the agency will comply with the order.
