Trump Wins Major Supreme Court Ruling Ahead of Midterms

The Supreme Court on Friday let the Trump administration use an expanded federal database to check voter citizenship, lifting a lower-court block ahead of the midterms.

The unsigned majority opinion said the judge’s order “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.” The court pointed to the federal duty to answer verification requests from state and local officials.

All three liberal justices dissented. The date on the order is September 25.

The program at issue is SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. It has long drawn on Homeland Security immigration records. The administration widened it to allow bulk searches and lookups by Social Security number.

Voting-rights groups and privacy advocates sued. They said the new version “has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights.” A federal judge agreed that the changes threatened eligible voters and failed privacy rules.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that “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 immediate effect is limited. Federal law restricts mass voter-roll purges this close to an election. For November, the database can be used only for questions about individual voters, not statewide sweeps.

The ruling is one piece of a larger fight over election rules. On September 15 the same court rejected the administration’s push to tighten mail-in ballot rules before November.

A House-passed voting package that would write the database changes into statute is still stalled in the Senate. Friday’s order does not replace that legislation. It restores a tool the White House wants clerks to use while Congress stays deadlocked.

Control of the House and Senate will be decided in weeks. The court did not settle the policy debate. It allowed the government to run the program it designed while the lawsuits continue.