A federal judge ruled Monday that voter registration records cannot be run through the recently overhauled Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to verify eligibility.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C. found that the federal government’s new system, which includes citizenship data, is in violation of several key laws.
“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,” the Biden-appointed judge wrote in her 75-page opinion.
According to Judge Sooknanan, the system violates protections afforded by the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act, as well as the Administration Procedure Act.
Sooknanan wrote that by overhauling the SAVE system, federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
She also argued in her opinion that decisions to remove voters were based on inaccurate information that falsely flagged eligible voters as non-citizens.
The SAVE system was overhauled by the Trump Administration following an Executive Order signed by the president last year directing agencies to strengthen protections against non-citizen voting.
Plaintiffs in the case have celebrated the ruling, framing it as a win for data privacy.
“The data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represented some of the plaintiffs in this case.
“They just didn’t listen to the American people who spoke out against this plan,” said Nikhel Sus, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, also representing plaintiffs in the case. “And now we have a court saying, you know, exactly what these commenters were saying, which is that this is an unlawful, unreliable system and it needs to be shut down unless and until Congress authorizes it.”
When asked for comment by NPR, the White House NPR to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which pointed the outlet to an X post from department’s general counsel, James Percival.
“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s [sic] latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!” wrote Percival.
The Department of Justice (DOJ), which is providing legal representation for DHS in this case, sent NPR a statement reading: “The Department will continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
As a result of this ruling, the SAVE system can no longer be used, but a timely appeal of the decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected from the defendants.
