Court lets Trump administration use revamped federal voter eligibility database

The Supreme Court on Friday lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database before November’s elections, granting President Donald Trump a temporary win in his aggressive campaign against noncitizen voting. The court’s three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented from the decision. The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Trump administration’s revamped version of a Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. It’s a program that has drawn scrutiny for its use of voters’ sensitive personal data and its tendency to wrongly flag some eligible voters as noncitizens. States’ use of the SAVE program is voluntary, limiting the ruling’s impact on the midterm elections. Existing law also blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, said David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He said DHS itself has admitted the data is not perfect. The Supreme Court on Friday lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database before November’s elections, granting President Donald Trump a temporary win in his aggressive campaign against noncitizen voting. The court’s three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented from the decision. The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Trump administration’s revamped version of a Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. It’s a program that has drawn scrutiny for its use of voters’ sensitive personal data and its tendency to wrongly flag some eligible voters as noncitizens. States’ use of the SAVE program is voluntary, limiting the ruling’s impact on the midterm elections. Existing law also blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, said David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He said DHS itself has admitted the data is not perfect. The court’s order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the Republican administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, saying it violated Americans’ privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls. A federal appeals court let her order stand. But the Supreme Court majority found that a 1996 law explicitly allows DHS to obtain information on citizenship and immigration from other federal agencies. The federal government also has “an obligation to respond” to states seeking to verify citizenship. “The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the majority wrote in the unsigned order. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. The database has long been seen to fall under federal privacy laws, she wrote, and there are real risks that legitimate voter registrations could be mistakenly revoked.