The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database ahead of the November election, granting President Donald Trump a temporary victory in his aggressive campaign against non-citizen voting.
The court's three liberal-leaning judges publicly disagreed with the decision.
The emergency order allows, for now, states to use the Department of Homeland Security's program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls.
But because current law prevents most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days before an election, the immediate impact on the upcoming midterm elections is likely to be limited.
Related: They will verify the citizenship of all voters in North Carolina.
States' use of the SAVE program is voluntary.
The court order suspends the decision made in June by a federal judge who had deemed the Republican government's recently renewed version of SAVE illegal.
District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, noting that it violated Americans' privacy rights and could lead to voters being mistakenly removed from the rolls.
A federal appeals court upheld its order
But the majority of the Supreme Court determined that a 1996 law explicitly allows the Department of Homeland Security to obtain citizenship and immigration information from other federal agencies.
The federal government also has “an obligation to respond” to states seeking to verify citizenship.
“The order prevents the federal government from using the program it considers most appropriate for the task,” the majority wrote in the unsigned order.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joining her. Jackson wrote that the database has long been considered protected under federal privacy laws, and that there are real risks that legitimate voter registrations could be mistakenly revoked.
“The harm caused by imposing burdens or disenfranchising even a few legal voters outweighs the nonexistent harm suffered by the Government when it is prevented from taking an action for which it probably lacks the authority,” Jackson wrote.
You may be interested: In 25 years, only 89 people voted without being citizens in the U.S.
What is the SAVE program?
The SAVE program was created under an immigration law that directs the Department of Homeland Security to work with federal, state, and local agencies to prevent non-citizens from obtaining government benefits.
The Trump administration took steps last year to significantly expand its search capabilities.
Since then, at least 67 million records have been examined through the program, but critics fear it will end up purging valid voters from the electoral rolls.
Some registered voters have already been misidentified. In Travis County, Texas, for example, authorities investigated 97 voters flagged by SAVE as apparent non-citizens and discovered that at least 10% of them—and likely as many as 21%—were U.S. citizens.
The county urged the Supreme Court to reject the government's appeal, while the state of Texas filed its own brief in defense of the database.
Alerts about errors in voter verification
Although the use of the SAVE program has been blocked for months, the government argued in court documents that Department of Homeland Security officials have continued to use Social Security Administration data “in certain cases to verify information and help determine whether illegal voting may have occurred.”
The Department of Homeland Security launched its own investigation in August to find non-citizen voters on state voter rolls, according to a federal whistleblower who said the effort is rushed, riddled with errors, and could violate state laws.
The Department of Homeland Security has defended the investigation, stating that it is being conducted "diligently and professionally."
National voter base
The effort to create a national voter list is among numerous measures Trump has taken during his second term to try to reform the way elections are run.
Most of those measures have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but does not grant that power to the president.
In mid-September, the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the president to restrict mail-in voting procedures ahead of the midterm elections.
Research shows that voting by non-citizens, which is already illegal and punishable as a possible felony that could lead to deportation, is exceptionally rare.
But Trump has remained fixated on the idea that huge numbers of non-citizens are voting in contests in the United States.
“No voter will be automatically eliminated”
Sam Hayes, executive director of the State Board of Elections, welcomed the Supreme Court's decision.
“Both the United States Constitution and the North Carolina Constitution are clear: you must be a U.S. citizen to register and vote in our elections,” he stated.
In a press release, Hayes mentioned that the SAVE database is one of the few tools available to ensure that non-citizens are not registered on the electoral roll.
“It also helped us identify more than 35,000 records corresponding to deceased persons, following a recent query in the system,” he commented.
“We want to reiterate that no voter will be automatically removed as a result of the voter registration maintenance tasks we perform using this database,” he said.
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