By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, Sept 8 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to allow it to use a revamped immigration database for checking the accuracy of state voter rolls, one of a series of actions that would boost federal involvement in voting ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Justice Department lawyers asked the court to halt a Washington, D.C.-based federal judge’s June ruling that blocked the mass voter verification system, which the judge said was haphazardly assembled and contained unreliable citizenship data.
In their Supreme Court filing, Justice Department lawyers called the judge’s order “indefensible,” arguing that it “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
Trump’s fellow Republicans are locked in a fierce battle to maintain control of both houses of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections.
The Department of Homeland Security last year redesigned a federal database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify a person’s citizenship and immigration status. The revamp allowed users to search many records at a time and gave them access to individuals’ Social Security numbers.
Since then, several Republican-led states have compared their voter lists to the database and canceled the registrations of registered voters flagged as noncitizens.
Critics say such election-related actions by Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an attempt to gain political advantage by narrowing the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.
Advocacy groups that sued to block the revised SAVE system said that the new approach has resulted in people who were wrongfully identified as noncitizens being kicked off voter rolls. They have argued that SAVE can be outdated, meaning immigrants who have been naturalized and are thus eligible to vote are sometimes labeled as noncitizens.
“Court after court has rejected the Trump-Vance administration’s effort to revive an unlawful system that puts Americans’ privacy and fundamental freedom to vote at risk,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, one of the groups that brought the legal challenge.
“Now, after failing to get its way in the lower courts, the administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, despite the law being clear that (the Department of Homeland Security’s) actions cannot continue,” Perryman said in a statement on Tuesday.
In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., sided with voting rights and privacy advocates who argued that the overhaul of the system made it less accurate and risked disenfranchising eligible voters.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 ruling on September 4 declined to halt Sooknanan’s ruling, prompting the administration’s request to the Supreme Court.
The administration is also asking the court to allow it to enforce a postal service rule restricting the use of mail-in ballots after a judge blocked the measure. In August, the court, powered by its 6-3 conservative majority, blocked an earlier order by that judge on procedural grounds.
(Reporting by John Kruzel with additional reporting by Andrew Chung and Luc Cohen in New YorkEditing by Nick Zieminski and Deepa Babington)
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