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Judge Blocks Use of Citizen Database 06/23 06:19
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped
version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration's efforts to
nationalize elections can no longer be used.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups
that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien
Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans' sensitive
personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from
voter rolls.
"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 said in an order explaining the decision. "This Court cannot
stand idly by while that happens."
She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing
Americans' personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that
created the SAVE program "knew that the database violates those statutory
protections."
The decision is a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his
efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having
noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which
critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter
information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the
Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future
uncertain.
"It's amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems
they insist do not exist," James Percival, general counsel at the Department of
Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.
DHS referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of
Justice said in an emailed statement that it would "continue to aggressively
defend President Trump's immigration enforcement agenda and DHS's use of the
SAVE system to verify citizenship."
Voting by noncitizens was already rare
The executive order seeking to create a national voter list is among
numerous steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul the
way elections are run. He also has tried to force voters to provide documentary
proof of citizenship to register to vote, ban mail ballots from counting if
they are received after Election Day and prohibit the Postal Service from
mailing ballots to people not on an approved list of voters. Most of those
steps have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution
gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no
such power to the president.
Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential
felony that could lead to deportation. It also is rare, accounting for just a
tiny fraction of those on state voter rolls,
The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS
help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going
to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since
April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search
abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned
through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters
from the rolls.
Anthony Nel was one of those whose registrations were wrongly flagged. The
South Africa native became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago but had his
voter registration in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, canceled temporarily last
year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE. The check wrongly identified
him as a potential noncitizen.
"I hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for
granted," he said in a text message.
Right to keep Americans' data private is at heart of the case
The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped
SAVE program violated Americans' privacy and voting rights. The groups also
alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring
transparency requirements about the changes to the system.
"The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at
reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass
voter verification," the judge wrote. "So they haphazardly combined and
repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including
citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."
Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing
that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from
voter rolls.
"They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database," said Sus, an
attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan's ruling as an "across the board victory"
and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge's ruling reinforced their
argument that the federal government doesn't have implied authority to freely
share sensitive data across agencies.
Mark Johnson, who teaches at the University of Kansas law school and
regularly pursues lawsuits over election laws, said "it couldn't be more clear"
that the SAVE program violates federal privacy laws.
He said an executive order from Trump cannot override a federal law.
"It's an illegal idea. Plus it's a bad idea," he said.
Elon Musk's DOGE effort was crucial for updating the SAVE system
During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Trump pushed false claims of
widespread noncitizen voting, Republican secretaries of state began requesting
improvements to the SAVE system to make it more efficient for catching
noncitizens on their rolls. One limitation was that the system had been able to
check just a single individual at a time.
DHS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Elon Musk's Department of
Government Efficiency delivered on those requests in 2025, according to public
announcements. They made SAVE free for election officials, allowed agencies to
search voters by the thousands and began permitting queries using names,
birthdays and Social Security numbers, as opposed to requiring DHS-issued
identification numbers.
Several secretaries of state have said the SAVE overhaul improved its value
as one of multiple tools they use to assess voter citizenship. But in her
ruling, Judge Sooknanan said the plaintiffs had shown that the updated system
had indeed been identifying some lawful voters as noncitizens and that states
using it "are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based
on inaccurate information."
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