The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let it resume a federal voter-verification program that was blocked by a lower court over concerns about the reliability of the data being used to identify voters.
The Justice Department filed an emergency request seeking to suspend a June ruling by a Washington, D.C., federal judge that stopped the administration from using a revamped immigration database to conduct large-scale checks of state voter rolls.
The administration argues that the ruling improperly restricts the federal government’s ability to use Social Security records when responding to state requests to verify whether individuals are eligible to vote.
Justice Department officials described the lower court’s decision as seriously flawed and warned that it could interfere with the government’s ability to assist states with election-related verification.
At the centre of the dispute is the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, commonly known as SAVE. The federal database was redesigned by the Department of Homeland Security last year, giving authorized users the ability to conduct searches involving large numbers of records and access additional information, including Social Security numbers.
Several Republican-led states have subsequently used the system to compare voter-registration records against federal immigration and citizenship information. In some cases, registrations belonging to people identified by the database as noncitizens have been removed from voter rolls.
The practice has triggered a wider political and legal dispute. Supporters say the database can help states identify people who are not legally entitled to vote. Opponents argue that inaccurate or outdated government records can wrongly flag eligible citizens, potentially resulting in their removal from voter lists.
Voting rights and privacy organizations that challenged the revamped system contend that its expanded capabilities have made such mistakes more consequential. They also point to the possibility that people who have since become naturalized U.S. citizens could still appear in older records as noncitizens.
The groups have warned that using the database for mass voter-roll checks could place eligible voters at risk of losing their registrations.
The legal battle intensified after U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled in June that the revised system should remain blocked. She sided with voting rights and privacy advocates who argued that the changes had undermined the accuracy of the verification process.
The administration subsequently sought relief from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On September 4, a divided appeals court declined to suspend Sooknanan’s ruling, paving the way for the administration to take the dispute to the Supreme Court.
The case arrives as both parties prepare for the November 3 midterm elections, in which Republicans are seeking to retain control of Congress.
The voter-verification fight is also part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to expand the federal government’s role in election administration. The administration has separately asked the Supreme Court to revive a federal rule restricting certain uses of mail-in ballots after another lower court blocked the measure.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has already intervened in that separate dispute on procedural grounds.
The latest application puts the justices in a position to decide whether the federal government can continue using the expanded SAVE system for large-scale voter-roll verification while the broader legal challenge moves forward.
