The Supreme Court has sided with President Donald Trump yet again, ruling that the administration can continue to give states looking to purge voter rolls of alleged noncitizens access to a Homeland Security citizenship database.
The database’s rollout had been blocked by a lower court since June. The New York Times reported on Friday that the unsigned decision was released with no vote count, just with all three liberal justices co-signing a dissent. What the Times describes as a “national citizenship list” combines sensitive data like citizenship records and Social Security numbers, and has already “mistakenly flagged U.S. citizens as noncitizens in past searches.” (Unsurprising, because all evidence shows that voter fraud is vanishingly rare.)
The database, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), was already operated by the Department of Homeland Security for use by local, state, and tribal agencies that need to verify citizenship and immigration records for licenses and benefits. According to the Times, Trump’s order to expand the system for use in elections also directed it to pull more types of data, like Social Security numbers.
While the decision might have “minimal short-term impact,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in the dissent, “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.”
The Times reported that a prior test of the database by Texas officials in 2019 pulled up 2,700 candidates for removal from voter rolls, although 578 were actually citizens. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running for Senate, announced 33 investigations last June—even in the phenomenally unlikely case that all are real instances of fraud, that would hardly be a drop in the bucket next to the 65% or so of eligible Texans who voted in 2024.
Previous Republican claims of voter fraud have regularly involved mixups or mischaracterizations of perfectly innocent data, like alleging people who had voted before their deaths or lingered on voter rolls beyond that were actually fraudsters.
Whether or not the database is used is ostensibly up to the states, which run federal elections. (There’s also the likelihood that Trump will somehow abuse this data in the future to “prove” fraud.) The court’s conservative majority found that under federal law, a 90-day “quiet period” should be enough to “[limit] the potential impact” on state voter rolls during the upcoming midterm elections.
It’s worth noting that Trump and his allies in Congress have sought to weaken or eliminate the 90-day period, while the Republican National Committee has a lawsuit before the Supreme Court seeking to carve out a mile-wide exception for purges of alleged noncitizens. That case is ongoing and arguments won’t be held until at least December.
However, the Department of Justice has filed a brief supporting the case, and SCOTUS could theoretically grant the plaintiffs an emergency filing allowing it to go into effect before the midterms. The court has recently taken to issuing unsigned shadow docket decisions intervening on Trump’s behalf in a number of cases, and this decision follows a long string of others where experts predicted Trump’s defeat in court as an obvious outcome only for him to win out.
SCOTUS did rebuff Trump in a separate ruling earlier this month, rejecting his attempt to require all mail-in ballots be screened by the Postal Service and verified against state-submitted lists of approved mail ballot voters. That order would have also required states switch to Postal Service-approved envelopes with individualized barcodes. It’s beyond obvious the sole intent of the order was to maximize the number of ballots the Postal Service could refuse to deliver, creating an arbitrary ballot clearinghouse under Trump allies’ control.
Federal courts have also dismissed at least 25 cases where the Department of Justice sought direct access to unredacted state voter rolls, according to Votebeat.
Trump’s proposed voter ID bill, also titled the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, has languished in Congress despite an obsessive White House campaign to push it as Republicans’ biggest priority before the midterms. MAGA allies like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have openly characterized the SAVE Act’s purpose as keeping Republicans in office.
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