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A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from creating a centralized database containing Social Security numbers along with information about voters’ citizenship status and other sensitive data.
District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, an appointee of former President Biden, said officials across numerous government agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable” in order to comply with President Trump’s March executive order attempting to overhaul federal elections.
The order required the federal government to establish a list of eligible voters based on available citizenship data and direct the U.S. Postal Service to only deliver mail-in ballots to individuals on each state’s approved voter roll.
Trump specifically directed the Social Security Administration (SSA) to create a “State Citizenship List” derived from its data, naturalization records and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, an existing database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that is used to determine eligibility for federal programs.
“Since then, 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,” Sooknanan wrote in her 75 page ruling.
“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. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens,” she added.
Sooknanan said efforts to establish the database were unlawful and violated the Social Security Act, Privacy Act and Administrative Procedure Act. She ruled in favor of the League of Women voters, who brought the lawsuit against DHS.
“This protects millions from baseless investigations and unlawful voter roll purges – a critical win for voting rights,” Democracy Forward wrote in a statement on the ruling.
The White House and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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