The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to clear the way for it to use a modified voter-citizenship database, pressing the justices to pause a Washington judge’s ruling that blocked the system before upcoming elections.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the order by District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington makes it harder to detect ineligible voters and weakens both federal election integrity and public confidence in the results. The dispute centers on the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE, which the government says is meant to help states verify whether voters are citizens.
The legal fight began after President Donald Trump issued a March 25 executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create systems that would let state and local governments check the citizenship and immigration status of voters. After that order, the agencies overhauled SAVE to add records of U.S.-born citizens, allow access to Social Security numbers and permit bulk searches, changes that made the database far more powerful than the version that had existed before.
The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center challenged those changes in federal court in Washington. On June 22, Sooknanan agreed that the modified system violates federal privacy laws, the Social Security Act and the rules that govern administrative agencies, and she barred the government from using it. In her ruling, she wrote that the federal government had knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.
She also said states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. That finding cuts directly against the administration’s argument that the system is needed to spot fraud before ballots are cast. Sauer told the justices the ruling is an indefensible order that threatens upcoming elections by stripping the federal government’s ability to use Social Security data when responding to state requests about voter citizenship.
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to put Sooknanan’s order on hold, but it did agree the case should be fast-tracked. That leaves the Supreme Court as the administration’s next stop, and the justices could move quickly because the request is tied to election administration and the lower court has already treated the dispute as urgent. The question now is whether the court will let the modified SAVE system be used while the challenge plays out, or keep the block in place as the case races ahead.
The fight over SAVE is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to change election rules before voting begins in earnest. On Sunday, the government made a separate Supreme Court request in a Boston case involving U.S. Postal Service mail-in ballot rules, underscoring how often the administration is turning to the high court as election deadlines approach.
