A federal judge, appointed by President Joe Biden, has blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from using an updated verification system, known as the SAVE program, to remove foreign nationals from state voter rolls.
On Monday, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by Biden, issued an order to prevent the Trump administration from using a streamlined version of the federal government’s SAVE program to combat voter fraud.
The update to SAVE allowed states to more quickly verify that only American citizens are voting in federal elections by no longer requiring that all nine digits of a voter registrant’s Social Security Number have to be entered to verify eligibility.
“This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote,” Sooknanan, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, wrote:
In the past year, several federal agencies have joined forces to create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and other sensitive data. [Emphasis added]
But decades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank. And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections. The 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. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. All 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. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens. [Emphasis added]
A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesman previously told Breitbart News that the updated SAVE program was necessary to ensure “America’s elections are reserved exclusively for American citizens.”