The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower-court order blocking the Trump administration from using a modified federal immigration database to initiate purges of state voter registration rolls, escalating a legal fight that could affect access to the ballot in every state weeks before the midterm elections.
The petition, filed by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, targets a ruling by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, an appointee of President Joe Biden, blocking the Department of Homeland Security from using a modified version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program — known as SAVE — to check state voter rolls for potential noncitizens. Sooknanan found that the endeavor violated several federal laws, threatened the right to vote and infringed on the privacy rights of American citizens. Sauer told the Supreme Court that the ruling was indefensible and that it threatened the integrity of upcoming elections.
The DOJ went to the high court after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to pause Sooknanan’s ruling. The appeals court did agree to expedite the underlying appeal, but the administration is now seeking a stay from the Supreme Court before the appellate process concludes — a step that Democracy Docket described as the department’s latest attempt to leapfrog an appellate court and secure Supreme Court intervention.
SAVE was originally designed to help states verify the citizenship status of applicants for government benefits. Under the Trump administration, DHS expanded the program to add datasets such as Social Security records and allowed states to upload voter rolls for matching. Before Sooknanan’s ruling took effect, the administration had used SAVE to check the status of more than 67 million registered voters. Those checks flagged thousands of people as potential noncitizens, but subsequent investigation found most of those flagged were actually eligible voters. Voting-rights groups have warned that using SAVE in this way is likely to erroneously disqualify eligible voters, and Texas’s use of the expanded program last year produced evidence that citizens were wrongly purged from the rolls.
The pressure to adopt SAVE has extended beyond the courtroom. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin earlier this year threatened state election chiefs with criminal charges if they did not use the program to check their voter rolls, and the administration has moved to condition states’ access to DHS anti-terrorism grants on their use of SAVE. Democracy Forward, which represents the pro-voting and privacy groups that challenged the modified program, criticized the DOJ appeal in a statement Tuesday.
The Supreme Court petition on SAVE follows separate DOJ efforts to have the high court reinstate new U.S. Postal Service mandates the administration proposed for midterm mail voting. A handful of states have been able to continue using SAVE because of separate litigation in Florida. The court’s conservative-appointed majority will weigh the stay request as the midterm elections approach.
