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Washington – The Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration’s use of a controversial database to check state voter rolls for potential non-citizens, temporarily pausing a lower court order that found the expanded system violated federal privacy laws.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices granted a request for emergency relief from the Justice Department to stay a June ruling by a judge in Washington, DC. blocked The Department of Homeland Security is revising a database — called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system — that the administration will allow states and localities to use to verify citizenship and immigration status of registered voters.
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan found that the Trump administration “deliberately trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a way that threatens the sacred right to vote” through the revised SAVE system.
The potential impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on the upcoming midterm elections is likely to be limited, as federal law prohibits states from systematically removing ineligible voters from their voter registration lists within 90 days of an election. The parliamentary elections on November 3 are less than 40 days away.
The Supreme Court said in its unsigned decision that claims by voting rights groups about the legality of the modified database “probably lack merit,” and said it was likely to overturn a district court’s finding that the Trump administration violated federal law with the new system.
Under immigration law, “the federal government has an obligation to respond to requests by state and local election officials verifying the citizenship of voters,” the court said in its unsigned decision. “The order below prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”
The Supreme Court said the district court’s decision to block the use of the expanded database, including for individual inquiries, “inhibits the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion that states could still use the revamped system to conduct individual voter roll maintenance.
“[T]a harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few legal voters is greater than the nonexistent harm the government will suffer if it is prevented from taking an action it probably lacks the authority to take,” wrote Jackson, who was joined by her liberal colleagues.
The system is part of President Trump’s government-wide push to find evidence of widespread non-citizen voting in federal elections, which has been largely debunked and rarely shown.
Voting rights groups challenging the revised database warned that the modified database would provide inaccurate citizenship data to states. As a result, some of their members mistakenly canceled their voter registrations, they said.
“Today’s decision is deeply disappointing because it puts millions of Americans at risk of being illegally targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter cleansing database weeks before the midterm elections,” the coalition of plaintiffs said in a statement. “However, this case is not over. The DC District Court has ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated several laws. We will do everything we can to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the District Court’s decision stands.”
The Department of Homeland Security hailed the decision as a “victory for election integrity.”
“It’s remarkable that we have to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we can use government data to stop non-citizens from voting illegally,” James Percival, the secretary of homeland security, said in a statement. “American elections are for Americans. The Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security will use any tool to secure our elections.”
The SAVE database
The SAVE database was modified in response to an executive order signed by Mr. Trump in March of last year. seeks to impose a new proof-of-citizenship requirement for those who register to vote. Federal judges have since blocked the citizenship-related rules.
The order directed DHS and the Social Security Administration to create a database that would allow state and local officials to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals who are trying to register to vote or who are already on state voter rolls.
The directive triggered the reform of the existing SAVE system, which is used by states to check eligibility for certain public benefits and licenses. It was expanded to include the records of natural born citizens; access to SSA records, including Social Security numbers; and to allow bulk searches for records of entities using the database.
In response, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five individuals sued the DHS, the SSA and the Department of Justice, arguing that the consolidation of Americans’ sensitive records from different agencies was illegal. They argued that some states cooperated with the federal government to run their voter databases through the SAVE system, and U.S. citizens who were misidentified as non-citizens were wrongly removed from the voter rolls.
In court filings, the Trump administration argued that the SAVE system, which has been in place in some form since 1986, was used with “clear congressional directive to break down information silos between government agencies.” It also said cases of wrongful removal of voters were rare.
Sooknanan, however, has the arguments of the Trump administration in one June judgmentsaid they “border on the absurd.” The administration, she said, “accidentally combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data they knew to be unreliable,” leading some states to remove U.S. citizens from their voter rolls “based on inaccurate information.”
The judge said that the revised system and the related notices of the DHS and the SSA are “contrary to the law, arbitrary and capricious, exceeding the legal authority, and without respecting the procedure required by the law.”
Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the Trump administration’s request to pause Sooknanan’s order, after which the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court for relief.
In court filings, Attorney General D. John Sauer called Sooknanan’s ruling “indefensible” and said it “threatens the integrity of the upcoming election.” He also said the judge overstepped her authority and that the voting rights groups that brought the initial lawsuit did not have the legal right to sue.
“SAVE does not disqualify a voter; instead, it only informs states whether the federal government can confirm citizenship,” Sauer wrote. “Thus, any election violation is caused by the states, not the federal government, and would not be remedied by the relief the court entered against the federal government.”
In response to the government’s request, lawyers for the plaintiff groups argued in court filings that “Congress did not authorize the federal government to create a master database of US citizens,” and said the government “recklessly created an error-ridden master citizenship database that jeopardizes the privacy and voting rights of millions of Americans.”
