{"id":636211,"date":"2026-09-26T02:10:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T02:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/636211\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T02:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T02:10:15","slug":"us-supreme-court-restores-trumps-mass-voter-verification-system-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/636211\/","title":{"rendered":"US supreme court restores Trump\u2019s mass voter verification system \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US<\/a> supreme court has revived an expanded immigration<\/a> database that president Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s administration said \u200caims to combat voting by non-citizens but critics contend could disenfranchise eligible voters.<\/p>\n

The judges granted the justice department\u2019s request to block a judge\u2019s order that had stopped state officials from using social security \u200bnumbers and other information to conduct sweeping checks of the citizenship status of registered voters against federal records.<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s data-sharing arrangement is one in a series of actions boosting the federal government\u2019s involvement in voting ahead of November\u2019s midterm elections in which Trump\u2019s fellow Republicans seek to maintain control of Congress. The US constitution gives individual states the primary authority to run and administer elections.<\/p>\n

The \u200bdepartment of homeland security last year redesigned a federal database known as the systematic alien verification for entitlements, or Save, used to verify a person\u2019s citizenship and immigration status. It allowed \u2060users to search many records at a time and to conduct searches using individuals\u2019 social security numbers.<\/p>\n

Since then, several Republican-led states have compared their voter \u200clists \u200bwith the database, and some voters flagged as potential non-citizens have had their registrations cancelled.<\/p>\n

Critics say such election-related actions by Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an attempt to gain political advantage by narrowing \u2060the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.<\/p>\n

Trump has carried \u200bout hardline policies toward immigration and has made false claims of widespread \u200bvoting fraud including in his 2020 election loss to Democratic former president Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

Advocacy groups that sued to block the revised Save system said the new approach \u200chad resulted in people who were wrongfully identified as non-citizens \u200bbeing removed from voter rolls. They have argued that Save can be outdated, meaning immigrants who have become naturalised US citizens and are thus eligible \u2060to vote are sometimes labelled as non-citizens.<\/p>\n

The modified system\u2019s overall \u2060error rate is not publicly known. The \u200bdepartment of homeland security and the justice department did not provide that information when asked.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0US television networks resume covering White House as legal battle continuesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In their supreme court filing, the advocacy groups cited a Travis County, Texas, election official who said 25 per cent of the system\u2019s non-citizen matches there involved people who had already proved their US citizenship, and news reports finding that at least 81 per cent of the system\u2019s responses in St Louis County, Missouri, were erroneous.<\/p>\n

The voting rights group League of Women Voters and privacy rights group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in September 2025 to block the Trump administration\u2019s modified system. They said it violated federal privacy and other US laws.<\/p>\n

In a June ruling blocking the revamped database, US district judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington said the system was haphazardly assembled \u2060and contained unreliable citizenship data.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll 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,\u201d Sooknanan wrote. \u201cThis court cannot stand idly by while that happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US court of appeals for \u200cthe District of Columbia circuit in a two-to-one ruling on September 4th declined to halt Sooknanan\u2019s ruling, prompting the administration\u2019s request to the supreme court.<\/p>\n

In a supreme court filing, justice department \u200blawyers called the judge\u2019s order \u201cindefensible,\u201d arguing it \u201cthreatens the integrity\u201d of the midterm elections.<\/p>\n

Texas, which intervened in the \u200bcase in support of the administration, has disputed claims that the system is unreliable.<\/p>\n

Due to separate litigation in Florida, the Trump administration has been able to continue using its modified Save system in the Republican-led states of Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio. \u2013 Reuters<\/p>\n

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US supreme court has revived an expanded immigration database that president Donald Trump\u2019s administration said \u200caims to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[969,42,1629,43,40,38,41,39,20966,115,90],"class_list":["post-636211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-donald-trump","tag-headlines","tag-immigration","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-trump-presidency","tag-united-states","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}