Supreme Court allows Trump's voter verification database - USA Today

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 handed the Trump administration a win in its push to increase federal involvement in the midterm elections.

An ideologically divided court allowed state and local election officials to use a revamped immigration database to check the accuracy of state voter rolls, rejecting a ruling that the database risks disenfranchising eligible voters and ignores privacy safeguards.

A majority said in the unsigned opinion that the database is likely lawful and the judge's order “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

The court's three liberal justices dissented.

The impact of the ruling is limited for the midterm elections because federal law prohibits election officials from mass purges of their voter rolls this close to an election.

That means the database can be used only for inquiries about individual voters.

Still, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent that “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.”

The decision followed the court's Sept. 15 rejection of the administration's attempt to tighten the use of mail-in ballots ahead of the November midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.

The database at issue in the latest ruling is used to verify someone’s citizenship and immigration status.

Until 2025, the system − known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements − primarily searched the immigration records of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Trump administration revamped the system in part to allow bulk searches and searches using Social Security numbers.

Voting rights groups and privacy advocates sued. They’ve argued that the new version has wrongly identified people as noncitizens, making them ineligible to vote.  

The government, the groups told the Supreme Court, "has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans' privacy and voting rights."

Attempts to impose the changes through pending legislation − as part of Trump's proposed overhaul of voting procedures − have passed the House but stalled in the Senate.

In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., said the government violated privacy protections Congress put in place “to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank.” And the government included citizenship data that they knew was unreliable, she said.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote.

She pointed to the fact that some naturalized citizens in Texas had their voter registrations wrongfully cancelled because they didn’t respond quickly enough to the state’s request for confirmation that they are now citizens.

The Trump administration argues that the database complies with the law. They also said the groups that sued haven’t shown that their members have been sufficiently harmed by the new system.  Any issues with how states use the database must be taken up with the states, not the federal government, the Justice Department told the Supreme Court in its appeal.

Without the justices' intervention, the government said it would be forced to use an "older, slower, more cumbersome, and less capable process” for verifying citizenship.

The advocacy groups that opposed the administration’s emergency appeal noted that their underlying challenge will continue to be litigated.

“We are deeply disappointed by today’s decision,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, “but this case is not over yet.”