On Monday, U.S. Federal Judge Amir Ali struck down a Trump administration rule that would have withheld a portion of states' counterterrorism funding unless states and certain municipalities made specific changes to how they administer elections.

In his ruling, Judge Amir Ali stated that the Federal Emergency Management Agency "exceeded its legal authority by tying counterterrorism grant funds to changes in routine election administration." Ali also said that FEMA, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, failed to demonstrate how the required election administration changes related to preventing terrorism.

Ali's ruling in the U.S. District Court in Washington responded to a lawsuit filed in August by two Texas counties, one Tennessee county, and the city of Columbus, Ohio, challenging FEMA's new rule. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, which filed suit against FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of some of the plaintiffs, said on August 17 that FEMA's conditions "violate the Constitution, endanger public safety, and put election security at risk."

"For the past two years, courts have largely blocked the government's repeated attempts to seize congressional and state election powers," the Brennan Center said at the time. "Now, the Department of Homeland Security is holding public safety funding hostage to coerce state and local governments into adopting certain policies that the government previously tried and failed to impose."

The Brennan Center stated that if FEMA's conditions were allowed to remain in effect, the total amount of funding that could be withheld would reach tens of millions of dollars.

Ali noted that FEMA issued the rule in June requiring states "and their respective high-risk urban areas" to make certain changes to election administration or face a 20% withholding of the state's counterterrorism funding allocation. These changes included: submitting a plan to transition from electronic voting systems using barcodes or QR codes to hand-marked paper ballots; conducting post-election manual audits of 5% of ballots under federally designated guidelines; and ensuring that each election jurisdiction reconciles the number of voters who voted in a federal election with the number of ballots cast.

The required changes also included verifying the U.S. citizenship of all voters in the state's registration database, as well as the citizenship of poll workers, election administrators, and election system vendors.

"FEMA's conditions here — imposed on state and local governments at their own expense, rather than funded by the grant, and concerning routine election administration decisions rather than the types of terrorist act threats contemplated by the statute — exceed congressional authorization," Ali wrote.

"For example, defendants claim that the condition requiring states to adopt FEMA's proposed citizenship verification procedures when maintaining registered voter lists 'ensures that only U.S. citizens vote in American elections,'" Ali wrote. "But it never explains how that condition, or any other condition, relates to the goal of remedying vulnerabilities susceptible to terrorist attacks," the judge said.