Judge rules Trump administration’s voter citizenship database broke federal law after some states used it to wrongly remove citizens from voter rolls

According to CBS News, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration broke the law when it built a central database holding private information about Americans. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., issued the ruling. The ruling blocks the administration’s major overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE.

The database was first created to check citizenship and immigration status. The administration later expanded it to include records of natural-born citizens and added data from the Social Security Administration, creating a large, searchable national citizenship data system. Judge Sooknanan found that the government broke three separate laws, including the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The judge said the administration carelessly combined and reused private information belonging to millions of people, even though officials knew the citizenship data was unreliable. The database came from an executive order President Trump signed last year, aimed at enforcing a new proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration.

Lawsuit says faulty data led several states to wrongly remove eligible voters

The effects on real voters have been serious. According to the lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and five individuals, several states used the system to check their voter registration lists against it. Because the data in the system was flawed, some states wrongly removed U.S. citizens from their voter rolls. These people were incorrectly labeled as noncitizens, a mistake the judge said carries real weight.

Judge Sooknanan said spreading this inaccurate information is defamatory, because it wrongly suggests these people broke federal law by registering to vote. She rejected the Justice Department’s argument that only a small number of records were wrong, calling that claim a red herring. This ruling follows earlier legal threats from states that pushed back against the administration’s national voter list plans.

The Trump administration defended its actions by saying it was simply following a congressional directive to break down information barriers between agencies. Officials argued that the Department of Homeland Security had the authority to update the SAVE system. The judge disagreed completely, saying the administration’s arguments came close to absurd. She concluded that the updated system was contrary to law, arbitrary, and capricious.

In her written opinion, she spoke plainly about the impact of the government’s actions. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Groups involved in the case called the ruling a major win for privacy and election integrity. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, released a statement after the decision. “The data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information,” she said. 

Then she added, “We are honored to work alongside the plaintiffs and co-counsel in this case, and are grateful that the court has acted to protect people and our elections every day and especially during our nation’s 250th anniversary year.” This case is part of a broader pattern, as Trump previously called for nationalizing election control in comments made ahead of the midterms.

The administration has the option to appeal the ruling to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. For now, the judge has set aside the overhaul, stopping the specific way the administration was managing the database.