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Judge Blocks Trump's Voter Database That Flagged Citizens as Noncitizens

Resist Now 3 min read
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A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from using its overhauled citizenship database to screen voter rolls. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled on June 22, 2026, that the system is unlawful and had been flagging eligible citizens as noncitizens.

A Benefits Database Repurposed for Voting

The system is called SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. The government built it to confirm immigration status for public benefits, not to vet voters.

In 2025 the administration expanded it so states could run entire voter rolls through it to check citizenship. That is a different job than the database was designed to do, using records it was never meant to match against registration files.

67 Million Registrations Scanned

At least 25 states fed their voter rolls into the system after the expansion. The judge found that states using it “are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

67 million voter registrations were run through the expanded SAVE database, which the court found was flagging citizens as noncitizens.

The Court Found Three Laws Broken

Judge Sooknanan ruled that the agencies had no authority to rebuild the system this way. The overhaul, she found, violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

She wrote that officials “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

A Losing Streak the Administration Keeps Running

The ruling fits a pattern. The Justice Department has now lost every lawsuit it filed demanding states’ voter data, a streak that reached nine straight defeats the same week, when a Trump-appointed judge threw out its case for Maryland’s voter records.

The administration says it will keep going, and vowed to “aggressively defend” the database. The courts have held so far. But a program that scans every registration against data the government already knew was flawed does its damage before a court can stop it, and some lawful voters were removed before the ruling landed.

What You Can Do Now

  1. Check your voter registration at vote.org, especially if you live in one of the 25 states that used the system. If you were wrongly removed, call 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to fix it before your state’s deadline.

  2. Call your secretary of state’s office and ask whether your state ran its rolls through SAVE, and demand written notice and a chance to respond before anyone is removed. State election offices set the purge rules.

  3. Call your members of Congress at (202) 224-3121 and ask them to require accuracy standards and individual notice before any federal data is used to purge a voter.

  4. Use the letter below to demand that no one is removed from the rolls on broken data.

Sources

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