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NEW YORK -- The Supreme Court on Friday lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database before November's elections, granting President Donald Trump a temporary win in his aggressive campaign against noncitizen voting.
The court's three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented from the decision.
The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Trump administration's revamped version of a Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. It's a program that has drawn scrutiny for its use of voters' sensitive personal data and its tendency to wrongly flag some eligible voters as noncitizens.
States' use of the SAVE program is voluntary, limiting the ruling's impact on the midterm elections. Existing law also blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, said David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He said DHS itself has admitted the data is not perfect.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who has refused to participate in the SAVE program, said the ruling will have no effect in her state because it "does not force states to change the way we run our elections."
The plaintiffs and their lawyers in the case called the ruling "profoundly disappointing" and said it puts "millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration's unreliable voter purge database" before the midterms.
On X, James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, responded to a post about the decision with, "Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting."
The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
The court's order puts on hold a federal judge's June ruling that had deemed the Republican administration's recently revamped version of SAVE illegal. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, saying it violated Americans' privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.