Trump asks Supreme Court to revive controversial system used for voter purges
By Tierney Sneed, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to reinstate a controversial citizenship records system his administration has sought to wield for sweeping reviews of state voter rolls.
Voter roll audits using the Department of Homeland Security data program known as SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) have been on hold in most of the country since a lower court found that the administration violated privacy law in how it beefed up the program for voter purges.
Critics of the program argue that it produces inaccurate results wrongly identifying eligible voters as non-citizens and could lead to flawed purges that disenfranchise voters.
Trump has made the program a central tool in his government-wide effort to find proof of non-citizen voting. For at least a decade, Trump has claimed that foreigners are tainting elections – allegations that have been debunked in numerous studies of non-citizen voting that have found it to be a rare occurrence.
US Solicitor General John Sauer argued in the new filing that the “indefensible” ruling by the lower court “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections.”
The new request the Supreme Court used comes after the Trump administration is already pressing the high court to also reinstate new US Postal Service mandates proposed by the president for mail voting for the midterms.
Many Republican-led states have been eager to use SAVE to vet their voter rolls for potential non-citizens. But they acknowledge that additional investigation is needed of its results before voters are removed from the rolls.
Voter advocates filed the lawsuit after the Trump administration expanded the program to make it easier for states to use for sweeping voter purges. DHS added new sets of data to the program – like Social Security records – and allowed states to upload their voter lists in bulk. Before the changes, states could only use the data program for individualized checks of a voter’s citizenship status.
The legal challengers pointed to Texas’ experience using the expanded program last year, putting forward evidence that citizens were wrongly purged from the rolls because of the state’s SAVE review.
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee, said in her June ruling blocking it that the “federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The DOJ stressed in its Supreme Court filing Tuesday that the federal government was not to blame for any wrongful removals, arguing that the onus is on election officials to make sure that any purges prompted by SAVE audits followed voter registration laws.
The Trump administration has tried to condition states’ access to DHS anti-terrorism grants on states’ use of SAVE, among other elections-related requirements. Trump also touted the SAVE system in his July speech on elections, claiming that states that had used it found thousands of non-citizens on their voter rolls. However, some states have said the figures DHS put out at the time were inflated and didn’t take into account how several of the voters tagged by SAVE as non-citizens were shown to be citizens upon further investigation.
Currently, a handful of states have been able to continue to use SAVE because of separate litigation in Florida.
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