One of many lawsuits over many attempts by the Trump administration to put a big thumb on the scale.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s overhaul of an immigration verification system to check voter eligibility across the nation, striking down a central pillar of the government’s efforts to exercise more federal control over elections.
The judge cited Texas’ use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which flagged several voters who were actually citizens as noncitizens, as evidence that it threatened both privacy and voting rights less than five months before the November midterm election.
“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
Sooknanan’s decision does not eliminate SAVE, a decades-old immigration-status verification program. But it blocks the Trump administration’s 2025 overhaul of the system, which made it easier for states to check their voter rolls against the federal database, which includes individuals’ citizenship status and Social Security numbers.
Election officials have found that the modified database, however, is prone to error, something Sooknanan referenced in her decision. Federal officials, she wrote, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
The ruling could strengthen challenges by voters who were removed, flagged, or placed under review by the system.
“States have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” the judge wrote.
[…]
Texas intervened as a defendant in the case since it had been actively using SAVE to verify the citizenship status of its more than 18 million registered voters. The state gained access to the database in March 2025 after signing a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Homeland Security.
In October, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office announced SAVE had flagged 2,724 people as “potential noncitizens” and sent the list to county election officials to investigate. That process involved mailing letters to each person flagged, requesting additional information to verify their citizenship. If county officials received no response after 30 days, the person’s registration was canceled.
Some voters who responded to the notices turned out to be U.S. citizens after all; others had their registrations canceled, although a specific number hasn’t been released. Hundreds of other registrants who were flagged had registered at the Texas Department of Public Safety, the agency that issues driver’s licenses and state IDs. In Texas, proof of citizenship is required to obtain those documents.
In the ruling, Sooknanan said the state’s use of the database burdened and risked disenfranchising voters by incorrectly flagging naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The judge pointed to examples of voters in Texas who were U.S. citizens and had to provide proof of citizenship to keep their registration active and at least one U.S. citizen whose registration was revoked without their knowledge.
Sooknanan also pointed to an amicus brief filed by Travis County voter registration officials as evidence that the use of the overhauled SAVE database was inaccurate. The state flagged 97 potential noncitizens in Travis County. Voter registration officials found that about a quarter of those voters had registered at DPS and therefore had likely provided proof of citizenship.
Travis County officials were later able to confirm that at least 11 people who were flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens.
“Texas threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of information obtained through the modified SAVE system; and they were required to confirm their citizenship to maintain their voter registrations,” Sooknanan said.
There was another lawsuit filed over the SAVE database in federal court in Texas, as well as a lawsuit filed in state court over the SOS’s various purge attempts. Neither of those are this lawsuit, and neither is this lawsuit also filed in federal court in Texas that sounds like the first lawsuit I linked to above but I don’t think has the same set of plaintiffs. Like I said, it’s confusing. Texas was involved in this one and they lost, so however you look at it that’s a good thing. Democracy Docket has more.