A federal judge ruled on Monday, June 22, that the Trump administration’s effort to aggregate Americans’ personal data to verify voter eligibility is unlawful, ordering that the resulting tool — known as SAVE — cannot be used in its current form.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, in a 75-page ruling, wrote that “the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE, was overhauled by the administration last year and is intended to flag potential noncitizens and deceased voters on state rolls. But the judge found that a number of foreign-born American citizens had been wrongly flagged as possible noncitizens, exposing eligible voters to the risk of removal.
Several states had already run their entire voter lists through the system before the ruling. Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, found that federal agencies, scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections, had haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans — including citizenship data they knew to be unreliable.
The decision is a significant legal setback for President Donald Trump’s push to use federal agencies to drive a nationwide crackdown on the presence of noncitizens on state voter rolls, a central element of his elections agenda.
Voting-rights groups that challenged the system welcomed the ruling as a check on what they described as an error-prone tool that placed the burden of the government’s mistakes on lawful voters. The administration is expected to appeal.
The ruling lands amid an intensifying national fight over election administration, in which questions of data privacy, federal authority and the reliability of citizenship records have become flashpoints ahead of upcoming elections.