SCOTUS Greenlights Use of Flawed Database to Determine Voter Eligibility

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Friday ruled that the Trump administration can use a controversial online tool to verify the citizenship status of voters. However, while the decision will likely lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible Americans, its impact on the upcoming midterms should be limited because of the election’s proximity.

At issue is the so-called SAVE database, which combines information on an individual’s citizenship, Social Security, and other data the government has collected on them. Until today’s ruling, a federal judge had barred the administration from using the tool because it is error prone and very likely will result in flagging recently naturalized Americans as noncitizens, which will either deny them the right to vote or force them to jump through additional hurdles before being allowed to cast their ballots.

In its decision, the majority acknowledges that at least one of the plaintiffs has demonstrated that Social Security records do not accurately reflect her citizenship status.

Still, the conservative justices lifted the block of a lower court that had barred the administration from using the database because the judge had found that the government had “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

While the decision is a win for the Trump administration and its efforts to get the federal government more involved in the administration of elections, the Supreme Court’s majority conceded that a moratorium on sweeping voter roll purges within 90 days of an election limits the ruling’s impact.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote a scathing dissent, also pointed this out.

“[If] there is a bright side to today’s opinion deciding otherwise, it is that the per curiam will likely have minimal short-term impact, as States will at most conduct individualized voter-roll maintenance using the modified SAVE system ahead of the November elections,” she wrote.

Of course, that assumes that the administration and allied states will not violate that provision of the National Voter Registration Act.

Although the ruling may not lead to the mass-disenfranchisement of eligible voters this year, it certainly has the potential to have wide-ranging consequences down the road, as Jackson pointed out.

She argued that the majority “focuses only on the harms the Government will purportedly suffer absent a stay, disregarding the harms that the modified SAVE system has caused, and will likely continue to cause, to lawful voters.”

Noting that the lower court ruled that the expansion of the database violated various laws, the plaintiffs in the case, which include the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, stated that the fight is not over.

“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” the groups state.

However, they added they “will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands.”