Supreme Court Clears Way for Trump to Use Disputed Voter Database
Washington: The US Supreme Court has handed the Trump administration a significant, if narrow, victory in its push to police the citizenship of American voters, lifting a lower court’s block on a controversial federal database just weeks before the midterm elections.
The court’s conservative majority ruled that while federal law bars sweeping purges of voter rolls close to an election, individual states remain free to check the citizenship status of specific voters using the disputed system, known as Save, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. Originally built in 1986 to verify immigration status for public benefits, the database was expanded last year to allow bulk searches using sensitive Social Security data, according to BBC News.
That expansion had troubled a federal judge, who ruled in June that the government had trampled on Americans’ privacy rights in a manner threatening the right to vote. An appeals court upheld that decision, only for the Supreme Court to overturn it on Friday, finding that a 1996 law obligates federal agencies to share citizenship data with states that request it.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented sharply. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the harm of wrongly disenfranchising even a handful of eligible voters far outweighs any burden placed on a government program it may not even have the authority to run.
Voting rights advocates echoed that alarm. The League of Women Voters, which led the legal challenge, called the decision profoundly disappointing and warned it leaves millions of Americans vulnerable to an unreliable purge system in the run-up to the midterms. Critics point to cases like Travis County, Texas, where roughly one in ten voters flagged as non-citizens turned out to be citizens after all.
Not every official views the program so warily. Georgia’s Secretary of State has defended his state’s use of Save, insisting that careful vetting, including direct interviews with flagged voters, has kept eligible Americans from losing their voting rights.
With 27 states already using the system, Friday’s ruling ensures the debate over accuracy, privacy, and electoral fairness will only intensify as November approaches.
