Immigration Database Cannot Be Used To Check Voter Rolls

A federal judge has, once again, disallowed the Trump administration from turning its thoroughly debunked election fraud propaganda into an excuse to violate the constitutional rights of eligible voters.

According to the New York Times, on Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop allowing states to use a centralized national database of citizens built for checking immigration status to screen their voter rolls, which the database was repurposed for last year via an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, who is still inconceivably dedicated to spreading the MAGA gospel that elections are being rigged and that non-citizens are voting in them, even if it means enshrining those persistent lies into federal policy.

But before we get into all of that, let’s talk about the database known as SAVE — not to be confused with the SAVE Act, though the act does serve the same purpose of backing election fraud propaganda — and what its initial purpose was, as well as why the judge ruled against its new purpose.

From NPR:

SAVE is run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and was previously used by state and federal agencies to check whether a foreign-born individual was eligible for certain government benefits. Those checks were done one by one.

Last year, USCIS’ parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with the help of DOGE, made it possible to perform bulk checks on SAVE. Further changes linked SAVE to Social Security Administration data for the first time and added the records of American-born citizens.

Sooknanan wrote in her ruling that in performing this overhaul, federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

Under Sooknanan’s order, the overhauled SAVE tool can no longer be used. But the Trump administration had already made SAVE checks central to its voting and elections agenda.

For instance, on March 31, Trump signed an executive order that, among its provisions, directs the Department of Homeland Security to use SAVE and other federal data to generate a list of eligible U.S. citizen voters in each state. Legal challenges are aiming to halt the executive order.

According to the Times, the judge noted in her ruling that federal agencies were joining together over the last year to “create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status and other sensitive data,” which she said violates protections Congress had intended to guard personal data.

“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.”

She also wrote that evidence presented in the case showed DHS officials acknowledged in internal communications that the repurposing of the database violated federal privacy law and could incorrectly flag eligible voters as noncitizens. “She wrote, for instance, that the database included outdated information that could result in naturalized citizens who had been assigned Social Security numbers long ago incorrectly appearing as ineligible to vote,” the Times reported.

Of course, in the Trump administration, one is required to hold on tight to a lie no matter how baseless and disproven it is, because denial of reality in the face of facts and evidence is simply the MAGA way. So, it wasn’t surprising at all when James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, responded to the judge’s ruling by calling it the “latest example” of “how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.”

It’s almost admirable how seamlessly these people can embed a lie in every sentence they spew. Well — it’s seamless if you’re a MAGA rube, who will believe anything, including but not limited to the idea that a vandal with a knife cut a 250-foot gash in a 2,000-foot reflecting pool, causing it to fill with algae somehow.

Percival likely understands that it’s not “the left” that insists election fraud in the U.S. is virtually non-existent. Reality insists on it. Every study and investigation done on the subject of rampant voter fraud has indicated that it’s a myth.

As for non-citizens supposedly voting in U.S. elections, back in 2024, I wrote that even the Heritage Foundation — of Project 2025 fame — failed to find sufficient evidence of it.

From my previous report:

The narrative that millions of people who are in the country illegally are, somehow, finding ways to vote in U.S. elections is nothing new. It’s been a right-wing talking point for at least the last two decades, despite the fact that, once again, the data does not support their white nationalist nonsense.

The Heritage Foundation analyzed illegal election activity in America and found an egregious, alarming, outrageous, out of control and unbelievable—*checks notes*—24 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023.

Twenty-four instances.

Now, to be fair, there was also a study conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice that found more instances of noncitizens casting votes in one election than the Heritage Foundation found in two decades. Far more instances, in fact.

Well, actually—six more instances. Maybe six. The Brennan Center analyzed 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election and found approximately 30 instances of noncitizens casting votes.

Mind you, these are rare instances that get investigated just like any other election crime, and there is zero evidence that the beyond-paltry number of noncitizens who have cast votes in any given election has been significant enough to even remotely impact those elections. So, once again, what are we even doing here?

Well, “What are we even doing here?” actually has a simple answer: we’re lying to give MAGA Republicans control of the election process, because that’s the only way they can win.

It’s the same reason Trump wants to “nationalize the voting;” it’s why he keeps trying, unsuccessfully, to force Democratic states to turn their voter records over to the federal government; it’s why the administration, with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, gutted the Voting Rights Act, and it’s why the president continues to lie about the 2020 presidential race being rigged against him. Well, that last part might also be about Trump protecting his comically brittle ego, but still.

The Trump administration and the MAGA-fied GOP are creating problems that don’t exist so they can say they fixed them, when all they’re actually “fixing” is a political atmosphere in which they are growing increasingly unpopular, which is especially inconvenient with the midterms fastly approaching.

That’s all any of this is about.

SEE ALSO:

Lessons From North Carolina: A Canary In The Democracy Coal Mine

Georgia FBI Election Raid Signals Looming Threat To Midterm Elections

Federal Judge Bars Trump Admin From Using Repurposed Immigration Database To Check Voter Rolls was originally published on newsone.com