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A federal judge ruled on Monday that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s efforts to nationalise elections can no longer be used.
US District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the programme, 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.”
She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralising Americans’ personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE programme “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”
The decision is a major legal setback for US President Donald Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having non-citizens illegally on state voter rolls.
The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralised federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling now leaves its future uncertain.
“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.
DHS referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice said in an emailed statement that it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
The executive order seeking to create a national voter list is among numerous steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul the way elections are run.
He also has tried to force voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, ban mail ballots from counting if they are received after Election Day and prohibit the Postal Service from mailing ballots to people not on an approved list of voters.
Most of those steps have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no such power to the president.
Voting by non-citizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential felony that could lead to deportation. It also is rare, accounting for just a tiny fraction of those on state voter rolls.
The SAVE programme was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to non-citizens.
Just over a half dozen states have already used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the programme.
Additional sources • AP