SCOTUS Greenlights Use of Federal Citizenship Tool to Vet Voters
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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.
The Supreme Court cleared the way Friday for election officials to resume using a federal immigration status verification system to check voter rolls for potential noncitizens — a significant victory for President Donald Trump’s administration, but one that’s likely to have little impact on the November midterm elections.
The unsigned opinion hit pause on a lower court’s ruling from June while the case works its way through the appeals process. The lower court had found that the Department of Homeland Security had violated voter privacy by expanding the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, better known as SAVE, so that states could run their voter rolls through it to check for any noncitizens.
Friday’s ruling is not expected to lead to any widespread removal of voters before the November election because federal law prohibits election officials from systematically unregistering voters within 90 days of an election.
However, as a result of the ruling, the Trump administration will be able to restart use of the SAVE system to scrutinize state voter rolls after the election, and election officials will be able to use the SAVE system to check the citizenship of individual voters in the meantime as well.
The Department of Homeland Security has maintained the SAVE system for decades to check immigrants’........
