A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using its overhauled voter verification database, ruling that the system unlawfully combined Americans’ Social Security numbers with citizenship data the government knew to be unreliable.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, sided with the League of Women Voters and other advocacy groups, finding that the revamped system, an update to the decades-old Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database known as SAVE, violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Sooknanan’s order found that federal agencies did not have statutory authority to overhaul SAVE, and the resulting data tool cannot be used in its current form.
Sooknanan said federal agencies had haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data they knew to be unreliable, in order to comply with President Trump’s March executive order overhauling federal elections. That order, signed March 31, directed Homeland Security to use SAVE and other federal data to build a state-by-state list of eligible citizen voters.
The ruling lands less than five months before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, in which Republicans are fighting to hold onto control of both chambers of Congress. Several states, including Texas, had already used the revamped system to flag voters as noncitizens, a process Sooknanan cited as evidence the system threatened both privacy and voting rights. According to the ruling, some members of the plaintiff groups were wrongly identified as noncitizens by SAVE, leading to the cancellation of their voter registrations.
Justice Department lawyers argued only a small number of naturalized voters had inaccurate citizenship data in Social Security Administration records, but Sooknanan called that argument a red herring, writing that spreading inaccurate citizenship information is defamatory because it implies affected voters broke federal law. The government disputed that characterization in court, arguing a naturalized citizen being mistakenly described as a noncitizen does not amount to defamation.
“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens,” Sooknanan wrote in her 75-page ruling.
Marcia Johnson of the League of Women Voters, one of the plaintiffs, called the outcome “a resounding victory for voters.” DHS General Counsel James Percival pushed back in a statement, saying, “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us.” The Justice Department, which represented DHS in the case, told NPR it would “continue to aggressively defend” the administration’s use of SAVE to verify citizenship. The White House had not issued its own statement on the ruling as of Tuesday morning.
The decision marks the latest setback for the administration’s broader push to expand federal control over elections, with three separate federal judges having already blocked Trump’s 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and limiting the counting of mail ballots. Federal judges have also rejected nine lawsuits the administration brought against 30 states and Washington, D.C., over their refusal to hand over complete voter rolls.
Monday’s decision does not eliminate the SAVE program itself but blocks the 2025 overhaul that expanded state access to citizenship status and Social Security data. A separate, related challenge to Texas’ use of the database remains pending in federal court in Austin. The administration is expected to appeal Sooknanan’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
