The U.S. Supreme Court has permitted the use of a 'non-citizen vote screening tool' promoted by the Trump administration ahead of the midterm elections in November.
According to the Associated Press and CNN, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the lower court's decision on the 25th (local time) and allowed each state to use the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to verify voter lists.
SAVE is a database that was originally used to verify the citizenship and immigration status of applicants to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving welfare or administrative services in the United States.
The Trump administration expanded and reorganized this system last year, adding data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and introducing a bulk search function that searches information for multiple people at once.
At the same time, each state's election management authorities were required to use this system to check the citizenship of those registered on the voter list.
The Trump administration's position is that a voter verification tool using the federal government's database is essential to prevent illegal voting by non-citizens and protect the fairness of elections. President Donald Trump has raised suspicions of election fraud, claiming that the results of the 2020 presidential election were distorted by illegal voting by non-citizens.
However, civic groups filed a lawsuit, claiming that the federal government improperly integrated and shared personal information of millions of people during this process.
Last June, U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sukhnanan ruled that the Trump administration's SAVE expansion program violated the Personal Information Protection Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The court also pointed out that there was a risk that legitimate voters would be removed from the voter rolls due to incorrect information.
Accordingly, the operation of the revamped SAVE system was immediately invalidated and its use was completely prohibited. The Federal Appeals Court also maintained the effect of the first trial's ban on the use of SAVE.
Accordingly, the Trump administration again appealed to the Supreme Court, and the conservative-dominant Supreme Court sided with the administration and temporarily suspended the lower court's ban on the use of SAVE. In other words, this paved the way for each state election authority to utilize the SAVE system before the midterm elections.
The Supreme Court noted, “The lower court’s order prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited for the job.”
Opponents worry that the system could prevent legitimate voters from exercising their right to vote.
Anthony Nels, a Texas voter, told the Associated Press he was concerned that the system "violates people's constitutional right to vote" and that "this appears to be yet another unfair means to influence upcoming and future elections."
Authorities in Texas, where Nels resides, announced that 2,724 potential non-citizens were discovered after analyzing the names of all 18 million voters last year through the SAVE system. Additionally, each county was notified that voters would be removed from the rolls if they did not prove their citizenship within 30 days.
But as local election officials began investigating in depth, that number began to decline, and earlier this month Texas officials announced that hundreds of non-citizens identified as suspect last year were in fact Americans and eligible to vote.
Experts point out that there are many cases where people who recently acquired citizenship are still classified as non-citizens due to delays in updating information in the SAVE system.
Steve Richer, a former Republican election official in Arizona, also wrote on social media that "the SAVE program has proven time and time again to be a very imperfect tool," and that "election officials should use it only as a starting point, not as a definitive indicator of citizenship."
However, the Associated Press reported that because use of the SAVE program depends on each state's voluntary choice, the impact of this Supreme Court decision on the midterm elections is limited.
Maine Secretary of State Shena Bellos, a Democrat who has refused to use the SAVE program, said the decision would have no effect on her state, saying it "does not force states to change how they run their elections."
