By a vote of 6-3, SCOTUS empowered President Trump’s administration to resume using Social Security records to confirm only citizens are voting in the election. The three progressive state judges voted against the decision. The ruling removes a lower court injunction against the administration.
SCOTUS Restores Program That Identifies Registered Noncitizens– thefederalist.com
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EXCERPT:
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to pause a lower court blockade on a Trump administration program that helps verify registered voters’ citizenship status. The vote was 6-3, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent.
In its per curiam opinion, the high court granted the government’s emergency application to temporarily stay a June ruling by D.C. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee. That decision blocked the use of a revised federal system to determine whether a registered voter is a U.S. citizen for election integrity purposes.
As described by SCOTUSblog, the modified program came about following a March executive order by President Trump that (“among other things”) instructed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to “create systems that would allow state and local governments to verify the citizenship and immigration status of voters.” Those departments subsequently “overhauled” DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database system “to include the records of U.S.-born citizens, to give it access to Social Security numbers, and to allow bulk searches (rather than requiring users to inquire about one person at a time).”
The Trump administration’s initial request to pause Sooknanan’s decision was rejected by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (2-1) on Sept. 4. The government then filed its application for relief with SCOTUS days later.
