Judge blocks Trump voter-roll data sharing system over privacy laws

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped citizenship-verification database to check state voter rolls, finding that the system crossed privacy and disclosure laws and could wrongly sweep eligible voters off the rolls. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said the government had built a centralized clearinghouse of sensitive personal data that Congress had forbidden.

The system, known as SAVE, was originally designed to help verify immigration status for benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps, not to serve as a nationwide voter-screening tool. The White House’s March 31 Executive Order 14399 directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile and transmit state citizenship lists from federal records and expand SAVE so election officials could use it to check the accuracy of voter rolls.

In a 75-page ruling, Sooknanan said the administration had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens” by combining citizenship data with Social Security information in a way that Congress had expressly prohibited. She found violations of protections in the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act, and warned that the system could wrongly label eligible voters as noncitizens and open the door to voter-roll purges.

The lawsuit was brought by the League of Women Voters and other advocacy groups, including privacy-focused plaintiffs who said the redesigned system was inaccurate and dangerous. Some of their members had already been wrongly identified as noncitizens, leading to canceled registrations. Reports on the tool found persistent mistakes, especially for people born outside the United States, and in Boone County, Missouri, more than half of the voters flagged as noncitizens turned out to be citizens.

The ruling lands just months before the November 3, 2026 midterm elections and adds to a broader legal setback for Donald Trump’s election agenda. Three federal judges have already blocked his 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and restricting mail ballot counting. States can still use lawful, individualized verification and ordinary roll-maintenance procedures, but Sooknanan’s order stops them from relying on this centralized federal clearinghouse to run mass checks on voter eligibility.