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Judge blocks use of federal voter database to check citizenship
AP News • • nation
Key Points:
- A federal judge ruled that the revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, used to verify voter eligibility, can no longer be used due to privacy violations and risks of wrongful voter purges.
- Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan found that the federal government illegally centralized Americans' personal data, violating statutory protections and threatening citizens' voting rights.
- The decision is a major setback for President Trump’s efforts to nationalize voter roll verification and crack down on noncitizen voting, a key part of his second election executive order.
- Critics and advocacy groups argued that the expanded SAVE system, which scanned over 67 million registrations, produced unreliable citizenship data and disproportionately risked purging naturalized citizens from voter rolls.
- The ruling highlights ongoing legal challenges to Trump administration election policies, many of which courts have blocked due to constitutional limits on presidential authority over election rules.
