Supreme Court Allows Expansive Voter Screening Tool Ahead of Midterms
Critics of the Trump administration system to monitor the citizenship status of voters had raised alarms about privacy and improper voter purges.
The US Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to use a federal database to check voter rolls for potential non-citizens. The database, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), is used to verify a person's citizenship and immigration status.
The court's conservative majority granted the Justice Department's request to block a judge's order that had stopped state officials from using Social Security numbers and other information to conduct checks of the citizenship status of registered voters against federal records. The liberal justices dissented from the decision, with one expressing concern that it could mistakenly revoke the voting rights of eligible voters.
The court's decision allows the administration to proceed with its plans to use the database ahead of November's midterm elections. According to the Jerusalem Post, the administration's data-sharing arrangement is part of a series of actions boosting the federal government's involvement in voting. The US Constitution gives individual states the primary authority to run and administer elections.
Brief written by urgent.news from Punch, Jerusalem Post, BBC World, CBC News — 4 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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