Supreme Court Allows Use of Trump Administration’s Voter Eligibility Tool

The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to launch a national online citizenship verification system using a database of citizenship information, Social Security numbers, and other data to verify voters ahead of the midterm election.In an unsigned opinion on Friday, the majority paused a lower court ruling that temporarily blocked the Department of Homeland Security from sharing the sensitive information with states ahead of the midterm election. President Trump, in March, issued an executive order calling for the department to alter the longstanding Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system in an effort to ensure election integrity. The system was originally designed to allow an individual’s nationality status to be searched to determine if they were eligible to receive public services.The League of Women Voters and others sued to block the use of the tool in connection with elections. The suit claimed that the database is filled with errors and threatened to block legally registered voters from casting ballots.The Trump administration told the justices that the block threatened the integrity of the November elections. The emergency order, for now, allows states to voluntarily use the program to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls as courts decide the merits of the case.In an eight-page decision, the conservative majority rejected the challengers’ claim that the use of the modified system violates the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act and believed the plaintiffs were not likely to prevail on the merits of their claims.The court’s liberal justices dissented with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — writing a 12-page dissent stating the database could cause some states to cancel voter registrations of some recently naturalized citizens whose status was not updated in the federal database.“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,” Justice Jackson wrote.“This imbalance, along with the Government’s improbable merits arguments, should have compelled the Court to deny the stay,” Justice Jackson continued.“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” the League of Women Voters said in an emailed statement.“However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws. We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands,” the statement continued.The decision could have limited impact on the midterm election because most states are blocked from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, David Becker, told the Associated Press.

Supreme Court Allows Use of Trump Administration’s Voter Eligibility Tool

Supreme Court Allows Use of Trump Administration’s Voter Eligibility Tool

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