Judge says Trump “trampled” voters’ privacy by feeding information into the Homeland Security system

The Trump administration illegally overhauled a U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer program as part of its hunt for noncitizen voters, a judge ruled Monday in a stinging ruling that accused federal officials of violating the privacy of millions of Americans.

The ruling struck at the heart of President Donald Trump’s push to assert authority over state elections ahead of November’s midterm elections. Under Trump’s control, the executive branch has sought to obtain state voter lists for the past year to feed into the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, computer program.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee to a district court based in Washington, D.C., condemned the Trump administration’s conduct over 75 pages and cleaned up a series of notices that Homeland Security had published implementing the computer program.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy of American citizens in a way that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This court cannot sit idly by while this happens.”

If Sooknanan’s decision is upheld, it could affect the government’s ability to implement it an implementing regulation aimed at restricting postal voting. The order requires Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state using information from SAVE and other federal databases.

Homeland Security has long operated SAVE, but before the second Trump administration it was primarily a tool for verifying whether individual immigrants were eligible for various government benefits. Last year the agency reconfigured SAVE to enable simultaneous searches of millions of names and allow states to upload their voter lists to identify possible non-citizens.

While some Republican-led states accepted the Department of Homeland Security’s offer, most states resisted calls to turn over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. In response, the U.S. Department of Justice has sued 30 states over unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department has failed to force states to provide the information. DOJ lawyers have specified that all data would be passed on to Homeland Security for analysis by SAVE.

“It’s amazing how hard the left will fight to stop us from solving problems that they claim don’t exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s recent ruling blocking DHS from dealing with foreign voting is just the latest example!” James Percival, Homeland Security General Counsel wrote on social media.

If Homeland Security appeals the decision, the time for federal officials to restore SAVE before the midterm elections will shrink. Federal law prohibits comprehensive voter purges less than 90 days before the federal election – in this case, early August before November.

Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a group that advocates for the “responsible use of technology in elections,” acknowledged that election officials are in a moment of uncertainty.

“The closer we get to the midterms, the higher the blood pressure is,” Smith said in an interview. “But I think most people say, ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.'”

Concerns from Democrats and voter groups

Democrats and voting rights groups have warned about the dangers of SAVE, saying it makes mistakes and mislabels citizens. They hailed Monday’s decision as a victory for voters.

“Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy,” Marcia Johnson, director of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters, said in a statement.

Sooknanan reached a similar conclusion in her decision, writing that federal agencies “arbitrarily combined and used the private information of millions of Americans for other purposes, including citizen data that they knew was unreliable.”

The judge pointed to affidavits from four naturalized citizens that Texas threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of wrong Social Security data in the SAVE system. At least three citizens had their registration revoked, at least for some time.

The Trump administration did not dispute the deposition, Sooknanan noted. The government also did not dispute the findings of an independent investigation that found that 25% of possible noncitizens identified by SAVE in Travis County, Texas, which includes Austin, were people who had already proven their U.S. citizenship.

The judge’s ruling came as part of a lawsuit filed last September by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center against Homeland Security and other federal agencies challenging the repurposed SAVE system.

“As the Trump-Vance administration continues its assault on voting rights, this is an important victory for the American people and our democracy,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

The Democracy Forward Foundation, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Fair Elections Center, represented the groups challenging the policy.

Three violations

The SAVE system violates federal law in three main ways, Sooknanan wrote.

First, it violated a Social Security Administration ban on disclosing Social Security numbers and related records. Second, it violated the Federal Data Protection Act, which limits how the federal government shares information. And third, it violated the Federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies set their policies.

The records in the lawsuit “show that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violated these statutory protections,” the judge wrote.

Decision prevented expansion

Before Monday’s decision, the agency planned to expand the operate of SAVE.

CNN reported Hours earlier, the agency had planned later this summer to require states to maintain their voter rolls through SAVE as a condition of receiving full Homeland Security grants.

Under the proposed changes, states could also lose at least some of their funding if they don’t offer plans to switch voting to hand-marked paper ballots. According to Verified Voting, these changes could affect all voters in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, Nevada and South Carolina, nearly all voters in Arkansas and Indiana, and about two-thirds of voters in Tennessee.

Homeland Security did not dispute the report when asked about it by States Newsroom. In a statement, the department highlighted Minister Markwayne Mullin’s focus on election security.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS and FEMA are committed to ensuring that funding for homeland security grants advances key national security priorities, including the security and integrity of our nation’s election infrastructure,” the statement said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an agency within Homeland Security.

“Every recipient of federal funds should expect to be responsible for how taxpayer dollars are spent.”