WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to nationalize elections can no longer be used.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans\u2019 sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,\u201d Sooknanan said in an order explaining the decision. \u201cThis Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans\u2019 personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program \u201cknew that the database violates those statutory protections.\u201d<\/p>\n
The decision is a major legal setback<\/a> for President Donald Trump in his efforts<\/a> to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having noncitizens illegally<\/a> on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order<\/a> the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,\u201d James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.<\/p>\n DHS referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice said in an emailed statement that it would \u201ccontinue to aggressively defend President Trump\u2019s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS\u2019s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n The executive order seeking to create a national voter list is among numerous steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul the way elections are run. He also has tried to force voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship<\/a> to register to vote, ban mail ballots from counting if they are received after Election Day and prohibit the Postal Service<\/a> from mailing ballots to people not on an approved list of voters. Most of those steps have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no such power to the president.<\/p>\n Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential felony that could lead to deportation. It also is rare, accounting for just a tiny fraction<\/a> of those on state voter rolls,<\/p>\n The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations<\/a> have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.<\/p>\n Anthony Nel was one of those whose registrations were wrongly flagged. The South Africa native became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago but had his voter registration in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, canceled temporarily last year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE. The check wrongly identified him as a potential noncitizen.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for granted,\u201d he said in a text message.<\/p>\n The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans\u2019 privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.<\/p>\n \u201cThe agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,\u201d the judge wrote. \u201cSo they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.\u201d<\/p>\n Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,\u201d said Sus, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.<\/p>\n Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan\u2019s ruling as an \u201cacross the board victory\u201d and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge\u2019s ruling reinforced their argument that the federal government doesn\u2019t have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.<\/p>\n Mark Johnson, who teaches at the University of Kansas law school and regularly pursues lawsuits over election laws, said \u201cit couldn\u2019t be more clear\u201d that the SAVE program violates federal privacy laws.<\/p>\n He said an executive order from Trump cannot override a federal law.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an illegal idea. Plus it\u2019s a bad idea,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Trump pushed false claims of widespread noncitizen voting<\/a>, Republican secretaries of state began requesting improvements to the SAVE system to make it more efficient for catching noncitizens on their rolls. One limitation was that the system had been able to check just a single individual at a time.<\/p>\n DHS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency delivered on those requests in 2025, according to public announcements. They made SAVE free for election officials, allowed agencies to search voters by the thousands and began permitting queries using names, birthdays and Social Security numbers, as opposed to requiring DHS-issued identification numbers.<\/p>\n Several secretaries of state have said the SAVE overhaul improved its value as one of multiple tools they use to assess voter citizenship. But in her ruling, Judge Sooknanan said the plaintiffs had shown that the updated system had indeed been identifying some lawful voters as noncitizens and that states using it \u201care actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to nationalize elections can no longer be used. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification … Continue reading Judge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it could wrongly purge voters<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1517629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-state-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 10:37:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1517629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1517630,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517629\/revisions\/1517630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1517629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1517629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1517629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Voting by noncitizens was already rare<\/h4>\n
Right to keep Americans’ data private is at heart of the case<\/h4>\n
Elon Musk’s DOGE effort was crucial for updating the SAVE system<\/h4>\n