Supreme Court allows Trump administration to use citizenship database ahead of midterms
The ruling will nonetheless likely have a "minimal" impact," one justice said.
The Supreme Court has given the Trump administration a green light to use a federal citizenship database to verify voters ahead of the midterm elections.
In a 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court order that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from expanding a 40-year-old immigration database -- known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system -- to help states screen voter records for noncitizens.
"The District Court's order thus inhibits the Federal Government's efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections. Under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay," the majority wrote.
While the ruling gives the Department of Homeland Security authority to use the database ahead of the midterms, the court's conservative majority noted that the impact of the ruling was blunted by another federal law -- the National Voter Registration Act -- which prohibits states from purging voters within 90 days of the election.
President Donald Trump has characterized noncitizen voting as a pressing threat to free and fair elections, but audits of voter rolls have suggested that voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare.
The court, ruling along ideological lines, rejected an argument that federal law prohibited the Trump administration from a revamping citizenship database to verify voters.
In an unsigned opinion, the majority wrote that Congress, in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, authorized the "an information-sharing regime like the modified SAVE program."
The majority also concluded that the Trump administration would suffer irreparable harm if they were barred from using the database because the lower court ruling "inhibits the Federal Government's efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections."
Due to the National Voter Registration Act's prohibition against purging voter roles this close to an election, the ruling only allows the Trump administration to conduct "individualized inquiries" to verify voters, rather than perform the bulk searches the system was created to conduct. As a result, according to the court's liberal wing, the ruling "will likely have a minimal, short-term impact."
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented from the majority, rejecting the argument that Congress allowed such a database. They wrote that the majority misreads the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act to override "the limits that privacy laws impose on the sharing of citizenship information with DHS."
"But there is no reason to believe that Congress meant to repeal laws that would otherwise prohibit federal agencies from disclosing citizenship information," Justice Jackson wrote.
She also pushed back on the notion that the Trump administration, not individual voters, would be irreparably harmed by the decision.
"In my view, however, the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take," she wrote.