Supreme Court upholds Trump’s expanded citizenship data checks, stoking fears of voter purges

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Friday upheld President Trump’s expanded use of government data to search for noncitizens who are registered to vote.

The justices granted an emergency appeal from Trump administration lawyers and set aside a judge’s order that blocked use of this data on the grounds it was error-prone, particularly for naturalized citizens.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented, citing the risk of errors.

The impact of the decision is likely to be limited, other than to highlight Trump’s distrust of elections and his unproven claims that a large number of illegal voters are casting ballots.

The administration had, for example, claimed that Nevada had more than 15,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls, only to have state election officials confirm these voters were citizens and lawful voters.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill learned in July that because of a software error, more than 6,000 people had been wrongly registered to vote when they registered their car.

But it is rare to find noncitizens who choose to cast a vote even though they know it is illegal to do so.

The decision clears the way for states to check their voter rolls using data from Social Security and other records. Individuals could be targeted for an inquiry, but federal law forbids late purges of the voters rolls.

Voting rights advocates said they feared the flawed data will have an impact on legal voters.

“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” said the League of Women Voters.

“As the court noted in its decision, it is flatly illegal for states to conduct mass removals of voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election,” said Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomón. “If any state official attempts to disenfranchise eligible voters using this flawed database, we will take them to court immediately.”

But Florida State law professor Michael T. Morley contended that the ruling and the data checks “will help states bolster public confidence in the integrity of the upcoming November election.”

Several Republican-led states including Texas and Florida supported the administration’s appeal.

The use of the new database “allowed Texas to more efficiently, promptly, and economically ensure the accuracy of its voter rolls,” the state said. It was “able to run its entire list of 18 million voters” through the expanded system of checks “in bulk and for no cost.”

It’s not clear the decision will have much impact in California and other Democratic-led states.

The court, in an unsigned opinion, said the law supported use of the data.

“The federal government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” the court said. “The order below prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

The administration said the Department of Homeland Security can respond to more than 1 million requests per day to check if a person appears to be a citizen or not based on Social Security records and other data files.

If not, state or county election officials may require these suspect voters to furnish proof of their citizenship.

However, states and local election boards are not required to conduct these searches. The administration also said its data reports are not final proof of citizenship.

Upholding these data searches “would not require states, candidates, parties, or voters to do anything,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer told the court. “It would simply make available to states additional information. … States that wish to use that information in the course of ensuring that only eligible citizens cast ballots this November should be free to do so.”

In dissent, Jackson said the court’s order creates the “risk that states might cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or force such persons to provide proof of citizenship before voting.”

The new system of voter checks is based on the 40-year-old Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, that was created by Congress. Then, the goal was to check if applicants were entitled to receive federal benefits.

Last year, Trump issued an executive order directing Homeland Security to expand the reach of SAVE to provide states “access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered to vote.”

It is a federal crime for noncitizens to register and vote.

Trump has long maintained that noncitizens are voting, but he has had little evidence to support that claim.

Voting rights advocates sued, contending that the new “mass verification” system was not authorized by Congress and relied on data that are protected as private under the law.

In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, agreed and blocked use of the expanded searches. The Trump administration has “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she said.

On Sept. 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals by a 2-1 vote refused to overturn her ruling, prompting the administration’s fast-track appeal.

The voting rights advocates, led by the League of Women Voters, had urged the court to stand aside.

“The government has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” they said.

The data searches are flawed, they argued, because they “only reflect a person’s citizenship status when they applied for a Social Security number. That status does not automatically update if the person later naturalizes.”

Texas admitted that the mass checks yield “some inaccurate information.” It said 2,724 people were cited as “potential non-citizens” among its 18 million registered voters.

In response, county officials had to check further to confirm the citizenship of these voters, the state said.

Last week, the Supreme Court dealt Trump a defeat when it blocked use of his proposed postal rules that could have prevented millions of voters from casting ballots by mail.

In a brief order, the court said Trump’s claims of power over states and their voting were “unlikely to succeed.”

But in the case of the expanded data files, the court said the law appears to favor the administration.