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.
Source link







