Judge ‘Doubts the Lawfulness’ of Trump’s Voter Purge Database But Won’t Block It For Now

A federal judge refused to grant an emergency stay on the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) overhaul of its immigration status database into a national voter verification tool Monday, even as she questioned its legality. 

“[T]he Court is troubled by the recent changes to SAVE and doubts the lawfulness of the Government’s actions,” Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote. “But because the Plaintiffs have not demonstrated irreparable injury, the Court may not grant a stay.”

The League of Women Voters, along with other pro-voting advocacy groups and five unnamed voters, sued DHS and other federal agencies in September, arguing that the administration expanded the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database into a voter citizenship confirmation system without statutory authority or the required public notices. The plaintiffs want to block SAVE’s expansion and have it returned to its pre-overhaul status. 

President Donald Trump issued an anti-voting executive order in March that directed DHS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) to expand the SAVE program and make it freely available to state and local officials for checking voter registration rolls for noncitizens. DHS quickly began implementing the changes — which included incorporating data from the Social Security Administration — without filing the public notices required by the 1974 Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. The agencies finally filed the Privacy Act notice in late October, a few days after the first hearing in this lawsuit. 

The changes to SAVE turned it from a database of the immigration status of roughly 26.5 million people into a system with access to the personal information of every American with a social security number (SSN). The system now allows for searches in bulk using partial SSNs. 

According to a CIS press release earlier this month, election officials have run more than 46 million voter registrations through SAVE. 

The SAVE overhaul aims to solve the nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting fraud, a thoroughly and repeatedly debunked claim. 

Monday’s opinion came as no surprise. At a preliminary hearing in October, Sooknanan did not hide her extreme skepticism toward the plaintiffs’ contention that they would suffer an irreparable harm unless she granted an injunction. 

The plaintiffs argued that the well-documented inaccuracies in the underlying SSA database mean the expanded SAVE system will inevitably turn up false positives and lead to legally registered voters getting kicked off the rolls. In October, Texas announced that SAVE had flagged 2,700 potential non-citizens out of its 18 million registrants, but local officials quickly realized many of those were obvious errors.

Still, Sooknanan noted in her opinion that the harm was too speculative to justify granting an emergency stay, emphasizing that plaintiffs couldn’t identify a voter who has actually been removed from the rolls or that the mistakes in Texas weren’t the state’s fault. 

“The Court takes seriously the allegations that the challenged agency actions might restrict fundamental voting rights,” Sooknanan wrote. “But the mere ‘possibility of irreparable harm is not sufficient’ to justify preliminary relief.”

While rejecting the emergency stay request, Sooknanan said she “intends to move expeditiously to resolve the merits of this dispute,” citing “the rapid ongoing developments and serious issues at stake.”

Sooknanan ordered the parties to agree on and submit a briefing schedule by Friday.