The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to restore access to the Trump administration midterm election voter database fight over SAVE, asking the justices to pause a ruling that blocks use of the modified system to verify voters’ citizenship. The filing puts the question back before the court after a lower-court order stopped the government from using the database while the appeal continues.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the order by District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections.” He also called the ruling “an indefensible order that threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by States to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
March 25 executive order
President Donald Trump issued the March 25 executive order that set the dispute in motion, directing the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create systems that would let state and local governments verify the citizenship and immigration status of voters. Those agencies overhauled SAVE to include the records of U.S.-born citizens, give it access to Social Security numbers, and allow bulk searches.
The Trump administration says the system is meant to combat election fraud and to help states respond more quickly when they ask the federal government to check whether a person is eligible to vote. That turns SAVE from a narrow immigration tool into a broader database used for election-related verification.
June 22 ruling
On June 22, Sparkle Sooknanan agreed that the modified system violates federal privacy laws, the Social Security Act, and the federal laws governing administrative agencies. She barred the government from using the modified system and wrote that the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.
Sooknanan also wrote that states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center brought the challenge in federal court in Washington.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
After the June 22 ruling, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to put Sooknanan’s order on hold while the appeal moves forward. The panel also said the case should be fast-tracked, leaving the administration to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court.
For states using the system, the immediate effect is that the modified SAVE database remains blocked unless the Supreme Court intervenes. The justices now have to decide whether to pause the lower-court order before upcoming elections, and that ruling will determine whether the federal government can keep using the database for citizenship checks in the meantime.
