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."