A big win for the Trump administration happened at the Supreme Court today. The court ruled that states could in fact use a large federal government database to screen voters for eligibility and keep non-citizens from voting.
The Trump administration can use a wide-ranging government database that includes Social Security information to help state officials identify noncitizens on their voter lists, the Supreme Court said on Friday.
The emergency ruling means the database will be in use for November’s midterm elections. But the fight over the procedure’s legality will continue in the lower courts.
In an unsigned opinion, the majority said the claims made by the voters who challenged the database’s use “likely lack merit.” The court added that, under laws covering the data, “the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.”
All of this goes back to an executive order Trump issued shortly after the start of his second term. That effort had been held up.
In a March 2025 executive order, President Donald Trump ordered the creation of a federal database containing Social Security data and information on natural-born citizens that state election officials would be able to use in broad searches to verify their voter rolls.
It expanded an existing database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE).
State and local officials have used the SAVE system to verify a person’s citizenship before handing out licenses and benefits, and also sometimes to verify voter eligibility. But the system was limited, without information on natural-born citizens or Social Security data…
In June, a federal judge in D.C. blocked use of the database, writing that the administration “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.” The federal appeals court in D.C. declined to pause the ruling, prompting the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court this month.
The judge who blocked use of the database this June was a Biden appointee named Sparkle Sooknanan.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan sided with the League of Women Voters to block the database which would have consisted of…individuals’ Social Security numbers, citizenship status and other sensitive data.
The judge found the government’s use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system to create the database violated key provisions of the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act of 1974 prohibiting the non-consensual disclosure of sensitive information.
In a 75-page opinion, Sooknanan ruled the modification of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s SAVE tool was clearly unlawful.
The Supreme Court’s order issued today wasn’t signed, but all three of the court’s liberals joined a dissent written by Justice Jackson.
In a 12-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized that the majority’s decision created the conditions for some states to cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or to force them to provide proof of citizenship before voting.
“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,” she wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The groups who were plaintiffs in the case also expressed disappointment.
A coalition of groups who had challenged the expanded online system, including the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a statement that the ruling was “profoundly disappointing” and had put “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.”
Despite the loss today, progressives aren’t really in a position to claim the Supreme Court is merely doing Trump’s bidding prior to the election. Just over a week ago the same court ruled against Trump’s efforts to restrict voting by mail. That ruling was seen as a big win for Democrats.
The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.
The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.
Democrats can take solace from the fact that states will not be allowed to do a wholesale purge of non-citizens from voter rolls this close to an election.
…the court noted in its unsigned ruling that the National Voter Registration Act bars the broad purging of voter rolls in the weeks leading up to an election, which “limits the potential impact” of the decision this year. States can still make individualized queries about voters.
So the impact could be limited this year but might be more pronounced in the next presidential election.
Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote. It’s common sense, yet Democrats are spreading lies about the impact of such a measure.
Help us continue to call out these lies by joining HotAir VIP and using promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
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