Trump asks Supreme Court to revive controversial system used for voter purges

President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to reinstate a controversial citizenship records system his administration has sought to wield for sweeping reviews of state voter rolls.

Voter roll audits using the Department of Homeland Security data program known as SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) have been on hold in most of the country since a lower court found that the administration violated privacy law in how it beefed up the program for voter purges.

Critics of the program argue that it produces inaccurate results wrongly identifying eligible voters as non-citizens and could lead to flawed purges that disenfranchise voters.

Rula Rouhana/Reuters/File

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Trump has made the program a central tool in his government-wide effort to find proof of non-citizen voting. For at least a decade, Trump has claimed that foreigners are tainting elections – allegations that have been debunked in numerous studies of non-citizen voting that have found it to be a rare occurrence.

US Solicitor General John Sauer argued in the new filing that the “indefensible” ruling by the lower court “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections.”

The new request the Supreme Court used comes after the Trump administration is already pressing the high court to also reinstate new US Postal Service mandates proposed by the president for mail voting for the midterms.

Many Republican-led states have been eager to use SAVE to vet their voter rolls for potential non-citizens. But they acknowledge that additional investigation is needed of its results before voters are removed from the rolls.

Voter advocates filed the lawsuit after the Trump administration expanded the program to make it easier for states to use for sweeping voter purges. DHS added new sets of data to the program – like Social Security records – and allowed states to upload their voter lists in bulk. Before the changes, states could only use the data program for individualized checks of a voter’s citizenship status.

The legal challengers pointed to Texas’ experience using the expanded program last year, putting forward evidence that citizens were wrongly purged from the rolls because of the state’s SAVE review.

US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee, said in her June ruling blocking it that the “federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

The DOJ stressed in its Supreme Court filing Tuesday that the federal government was not to blame for any wrongful removals, arguing that the onus is on election officials to make sure that any purges prompted by SAVE audits followed voter registration laws.

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The Trump administration has tried to condition states’ access to DHS anti-terrorism grants on states’ use of SAVE, among other elections-related requirements. Trump also touted the SAVE system in his July speech on elections, claiming that states that had used it found thousands of non-citizens on their voter rolls. However, some states have said the figures DHS put out at the time were inflated and didn’t take into account how several of the voters tagged by SAVE as non-citizens were shown to be citizens upon further investigation.

Currently, a handful of states have been able to continue to use SAVE because of separate litigation in Florida.

周二，唐纳德·特朗普总统向最高法院提出请求，要求恢复一项备受争议的公民身份记录系统。他的政府一直试图利用该系统对各州选民名册进行全面审查。

自一家下级法院裁定政府在加强选民清理程序时违反了隐私法以来，使用国土安全部数据程序 SAVE（系统性外国人权利核查）进行的选民名册审计在全国大部分地区已被暂停。

该计划的批评者认为，该计划会产生不准确的结果，错误地将符合资格的选民认定为非公民，并可能导致有缺陷的清洗，从而剥夺选民的选举权。

鲁拉·鲁哈纳/路透社/档案照片

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特朗普已将该项目作为其政府范围内寻找非公民投票证据的核心工具。至少十年来，特朗普一直声称外国人正在污染选举——但众多关于非公民投票的研究已经驳斥了这一指控，这些研究发现非公民投票现象极为罕见。

美国副检察长约翰·绍尔在新提交的文件中辩称，下级法院“站不住脚的”裁决“威胁到即将举行的选举的公正性”。

最高法院提出的这项新请求是在特朗普政府向最高法院施压，要求其恢复总统为中期选举邮寄投票提出的美国邮政服务新规定之后提出的。

许多共和党执政的州都急于利用“选民安全审查系统”（SAVE）来核查选民名册，以识别潜在的非公民。但他们也承认，在将选民从名册中移除之前，还需要对审查结果进行进一步调查。

特朗普政府扩大了该项目的使用范围，使各州更容易利用该项目进行大规模的选民名单清理，之后选民权益倡导者提起了诉讼。国土安全部向该项目添加了新的数据集——例如社会保障记录——并允许各州批量上传选民名单。在变更之前，各州只能使用该项目对选民的公民身份进行个别核查。

法律挑战者指出德克萨斯州去年使用扩大计划的经验，并提出证据表明，由于该州的 SAVE 审查，公民被错误地从名册中清除。

美国地区法官斯帕克尔·苏克纳南（Sparkle Sooknanan）是乔·拜登总统任命的，她在6月份的裁决中阻止了该法案的实施，并表示“联邦政府明知故犯地践踏了美国公民的隐私权，这种行为威胁到了神圣的投票权”。

美国司法部周二向最高法院提交的文件强调，联邦政府不应为任何不当的选民清除行为负责，并辩称选举官员有责任确保由 SAVE 审计引发的任何清理行动都符合选民登记法。

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特朗普政府试图将各州获得国土安全部反恐拨款的资格与各州使用“选民登记系统”（SAVE）以及其他与选举相关的要求挂钩。特朗普在7月的选举演讲中也大力宣传了SAVE系统，声称使用该系统的州在其选民名册中发现了数千名非公民。然而，一些州表示，国土安全部当时公布的数据被夸大了，并没有考虑到SAVE系统标记为非公民的几名选民，经进一步调查后被证实是公民。

目前，由于佛罗里达州的一项独立诉讼，少数几个州得以继续使用 SAVE 法案。