A federal judge has ruled that a revamped federal tool that state election officials have used in their efforts to identify illegally registered noncitizen voters is unlawful and cannot be used.

A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s election integrity strategy is unlawful and can no longer be used.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.

“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 said in an order explaining the decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineEnglish
    161·
    2 days ago

    I have been pleasantly but consistently surprised by the number of times the courts have sided against Trump, given his number of nominations in his first and current terms.

    Even the stacked SCOTUS seems to be 50:50 at times, though they’re very shortsighted for gutting the Voting Rights Act which could lead to all of them being purged at some point.

    • Lasherz@lemmy.worldM
      8·
      2 days ago

      I think they’re finding it more difficult when it’s written directly into the constitution that the states run the election and not the federal government. That isn’t to say that they need to justify their decisions since they have gotten away with providing such hollowed out reason that a standard cannot be extrapolated to the lower courts, but I think when it’s right there in the constitution in plain English it becomes a question of whether or not the judicial branch should have the power it grabbed early on in the union, and that threatens all judges, not just them.