NEW DELHI: The US Supreme Court revived on September 25 an expanded immigration database that President Donald Trump’s administration said aims to combat voting by noncitizens but critics contend could disenfranchise eligible voters.
The justices granted the Justice Department’s request to block a judge’s order that had stopped state officials from using Social Security numbers and other information to conduct sweeping checks of the citizenship status of registered voters against federal records. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from the order.
The majority said the plaintiffs’ arguments likely fail because federal law expressly authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration.
The administration’s datasharing arrangement is one in a series of actions boosting the federal government’s involvement in voting ahead of November’s midterm elections in which Trump’s fellow Republicans seek to maintain control of Congress. The US Constitution gives individual states the primary authority to run and administer elections.
Alien verification
The Department of Homeland Security last year redesigned a federal database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify a person’s citizenship and immigration status. The revamp allowed users to search many records at a time and to conduct searches using individuals’ Social Security numbers.
Since the federal database was expanded, several Republican-led states have compared their voter lists to the database, and some voters flagged as potential noncitizens have had their registrations canceled. Critics say such electionrelated actions by Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an attempt to gain political advantage by narrowing the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democraticleaning voters.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the plaintiffs, called the SC decision “profoundly disappointing,” saying it puts Americans “at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.
