Supreme Court allows Trump admin to use federal voter eligibility database during appeal
· Fox News
An order issued Friday by the Supreme Court temporarily allows the Trump administration to move forward with a mass voter verification system.
The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls.
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Because existing law blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, the immediate impact of Friday's order on the upcoming midterms is likely limited, the Associated Press reported. States' use of the SAVE program is voluntary.
The court’s order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the Republican administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, saying it violated Americans’ privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.
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A federal appeals court declined to pause Sooknanan's ruling, prompting the administration's appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration moved to expand SAVE after the president signed an executive order directing the creation of a federal voter registration list and imposed new restrictions on eligibility for voting by mail as part of a broader effort to combat voter fraud.
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The SAVE program was created in 1986 under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. The Trump administration last year moved to significantly expand its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics, the AP says, worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in dissenting.
"In my view… 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," Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion. "This imbalance, along with the Government’s improbable merits arguments, should have compelled the Court to deny the stay."
Fox News' Shannon Bream, Bill Mears, Ashley J. DiMella and the Associated Press contributed to this report.