Pro-voting groups oppose DHS’s latest bid to purge voters using national citizenship database

A group of pro-voting and privacy organizations that are suing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have pushed back on the government’s latest bid to retrofit a federal database to purge voters from registration rolls.

In a court filing Monday, the organizations slammed the Trump administration’s effort to pause a court ruling blocking it from turning a database originally designed to help states check the citizenship status of people applying for government benefits into a new system to monitor state voter registration lists.

The advocacy groups allege that the federal government is making contradictory claims as it attempts to expand President Donald Trump’s control over elections.

The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and other organizations asked a federal court to deny the Trump administration’s motion to stay the ruling, which found that Trump’s attempts to unilaterally change the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database were illegal.

Based on the president’s first anti-voting executive order, the Trump administration took steps last year to refashion SAVE into a centralized master citizenship database by pooling the private information of millions of Americans — including Social Security records — held by agencies across the federal government into DHS. 

As part of Trump’s campaign to federalize the creation and maintenance of state registration rolls, DHS also permitted states to use the database to check the citizenship status of people on their voter lists under the guise of purging noncitizens from the rolls. 

Republican-led states that fed their rolls through the system claimed that it found thousands of potential noncitizens. But subsequent investigations revealed that the program routinely flagged naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote. 

In a summary judgment late last month, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan sided with the voting and privacy groups in determining that the Trump administration “haphazardly” threatened “the sacred right to vote” by adopting the expanded SAVE system knowing that it would falsely flag eligible voters as potential noncitizens.

Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, ultimately found the effort violated three separate federal laws, including the Privacy Act of 1974, which Congress passed to prevent federal agencies from illegally gathering, sharing or misusing Americans’ personal information.

While the Department of Justice (DOJ) appealed Sooknanan’s decision, DHS appeared to shut down its expanded version of SAVE in compliance with her order. 

However, the DOJ asked Sooknanan last week to stay her order, claiming that a settlement with four Republican-led states bound DHS to continue offering the modified version of SAVE to those states.

In their court filing Monday, the organizations noted that the Trump administration was attempting to have it both ways in each case.

In the League of Women Voters and EPIC’s lawsuit, the DOJ asked Sooknanan to pause her order because the settlement agreement required DHS to provide states with access to SAVE. But when Republican-led states asked a federal court in Florida to restore access to the expanded SAVE system, the DOJ asserted that DHS did not breach the settlement agreement because no settlement could force a party to violate a court order and federal law.

The pro-voting organizations sharply criticized this contradictory approach.

“It is not this Court’s responsibility to stay its own decision to protect the Federal Defendants from possible consequences flowing from DHS’s own ill-advised settlement agreement,” the League of Women Voters and EPIC’s motion reads.

The groups also slammed the DOJ’s assertions that Sooknanan’s order created national security vulnerabilities and will contribute to widespread voter fraud.

“While the Federal Defendants raise the specter of widespread voter fraud, arguing that removal of the modified SAVE system will ‘embolden bad actors,’ they again provide no evidence, either of the existence of widespread voter fraud (there is none) or the effectiveness of modified SAVE as a deterrent,” the groups argued.

While DHS has so far offered states the enhanced version of SAVE for voluntary use, the agency may be gearing up to force states to feed their voter rolls through the modified database as a prerequisite to receiving grants intended to help them prevent terrorism and prepare for natural disasters.

The DOJ has also sought to force every state to surrender its registration records so they can be tested in the database. The department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for access to those records, but no court has ruled in its favor in those suits. It voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against Oklahoma.