Trump ‘trampled’ voter privacy by feeding info into Homeland Security system, judge says

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

The ruling struck at the core of President Donald Trump’s project to assert authority over state-run elections ahead of the November midterms. Under Trump’s control, the executive branch has spent the past year attempting to obtain state voter rolls to feed into the computer program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

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

“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,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Sooknanan’s decision, if upheld, could hamper the administration’s ability to implement an executive order aimed at restricting voting by mail. The order requires Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state using information from SAVE, along with other federal databases.

Homeland Security has long operated SAVE, but prior to the second Trump administration it was primarily a tool to check whether individual immigrants were eligible for various government benefits. Last year, the agency reconfigured SAVE to allow for simultaneous searches of millions of names and allowed states to upload their voter rolls for the purpose of identifying possible noncitizens.

While some Republican-led states took Homeland Security up on the offer, most states have resisted demands to turn over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. In turn, the U.S. Department of Justice has sued 30 states for unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department has been unsuccessful in forcing states to provide the information. DOJ attorneys have indicated that any data would be shared with Homeland Security for analysis by SAVE.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!” Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival wrote on social media.

If Homeland Security appeals the decision, federal officials face a shrinking window to restore their ability to use SAVE before the midterms. Federal law prohibits sweeping purges of voters less than 90 days before federal elections — in this case early August ahead of November.

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

“The closer we get to the midterms, it raises your blood pressure,” Smith said in an interview. “But I think most people are (saying), ‘well, we just have to wait and see.’”

Concerns from Dems, voting groups

Democrats and voting rights groups have warned about the dangers of SAVE, saying it makes errors and has wrongly flagged 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, chief of activation and justice for the League of Women Voters, said in a statement.

Sooknanan came to a similar conclusion in her decision, writing that federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

The judge pointed to sworn declarations by four naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data contained in the SAVE system. At least three citizens had their registrations revoked for at least some time.

The Trump administration didn’t dispute the sworn testimony, Sooknanan noted. The administration also didn’t contest, she wrote, 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 in a lawsuit filed against Homeland Security and other federal agencies last September by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center that challenged the repurposed SAVE system. 

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

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

Three violations

The SAVE system violated federal law in three primary ways, Sooknanan wrote. 

First, it breached a ban on the Social Security Administration against disclosing Social Security numbers and related records. Second, it violated the federal Privacy Act, which restricts how the federal government shares information. And third, it violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies set policy.

The record in the lawsuit “shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections,” the judge wrote.

Decision preempted expansion 

Before Monday’s decision, the agency was planning to expand the use of SAVE. 

CNN reported hours earlier that the agency later this summer planned to require states to run their voter rolls through SAVE as a condition of receiving full homeland security grant funding.

Under the planned changes, states could also lose at least some funding if they don’t offer plans to move voting toward hand-marked paper ballots. Those changes could affect all voters in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, Nevada and South Carolina, nearly all voters in Arkansas and Indiana, and roughly two-thirds of voters in Tennessee, according to data from Verified Voting.

Homeland Security didn’t dispute the report when asked about it by States Newsroom. In a statement, the department emphasized Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s focus on election security.

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

“Any recipient of federal funding should expect accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent.”