It reversed a lower court. Three justices dissented.
By Catholics for Catholics
On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can verify Social Security numbers, citizenship status and other data to ascertain eligibility to vote in the Nov. 3 midterm elections, undoing a lower court order and handing the White House a temporary victory on one of President Trump’s cherished disputes.
The court’s six conservative justices, in an unsigned per curiam opinion, said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system “to conduct individualized inquiries” (emphasis original), cautioning that it was already too late in the 2026 cycle for state and local officials to conduct mass purges of their voter rolls, according to a story by the Epoch Times.
DC US District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, in a June ruling had banned DHS from using SAVE, a 40-year-old database created to prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens — and revamped in response to President Trump’s March 2025 executive order meant to ensure only Americans vote in national elections.
Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.
A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.
“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,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent, joined by fellow liberals Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed US citizens had sued DHS, the Justice Department and the Social Security Administration (SSA), charging the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights.
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