The Trump administration violated federal privacy protections by revamping a citizen data program so it could be used more aggressively to remove names from voter rolls, a federal judge ruled Monday.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s ruling represents a major setback for President Donald Trump’s effort to identify foreign nationals on state voter rolls, a move that voting rights advocates and election officials say could unduly target citizens and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.
Sooknanan’s order suspends use of the expanded data system.
“In short, the federal government has knowingly violated the privacy rights of American citizens in a way that threatens . This court cannot stand idly by while this happens,” said Sooknanan, nominated by President Joe Biden.
The case focused on the federal data program known as SAVE — or the Alien Verification for Benefits System — which has long been used by the government to verify citizenship when granting public benefits, but was also being made available to election officials to verify voter lists and identify noncitizens.
In the first months of Trump’s second term, his administration beefed up the program by expanding the types of data entered into the system, adding Social Security data and information from other agencies.
Sooknanan wrote in his decision on Monday that the administration knew the SAVE overhaul violated congressionally approved privacy protections, but still went ahead as part of a rush “to comply with an Executive Order aimed at overhauling federal elections, which directed them to create a mass voter verification system.”
Since the reformulation, the administration has both encouraged states to use it and, as reported by the CNN on Monday, now seeks to punish states that don’t do so.
The Justice Department has also begun an unprecedented campaign to collect complete, unmarked voter registration files from every state so that the federal government can compare the lists with the citizenship data program.
A more recent executive order from Trump also directs the Department of Homeland Security to use SAVE and other federal data sources to assemble voting ages for each state.
It is not clear how this new decision will affect these projects in practice, but some of these initiatives were already facing resistance in court in other processes.
