Politics

A Judge Ruled Trump’s Voter Database Violated Three Federal Laws

By Mike Harper · June 23, 2026

Several states already used it to purge their voter rolls. Now a federal judge says the whole system was illegal.

US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled Monday that the Trump administration violated three federal laws — the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act — when it overhauled an immigration database called SAVE and used it to flag and remove registered voters. The system was designed to verify citizenship and immigration status. The administration expanded it to cross-reference voter registration lists — and American citizens who are foreign-born were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens and removed from the rolls.

“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,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The ruling sets aside the administration’s overhaul of the SAVE database entirely. The system cannot be used in its current form. States that already ran their voter lists through the database and removed voters based on its results are now operating with purged rolls that a federal judge has declared were produced by an unlawful process.

The practical effect for individual voters: if you are a naturalized citizen who was recently removed from your state’s voter rolls, this ruling is the legal basis for challenging that removal. Contact your state’s election office or secretary of state to verify your registration status — particularly if you live in one of the 17 states that voluntarily turned over their voter rolls to the federal government.

The SAVE system has existed since 1986. What the administration did was expand it — allowing bulk searches of voter registration lists against immigration records and giving users access to Social Security numbers. The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued, arguing the expansion was never authorized by Congress and violated privacy protections that have been in place for decades.

The administration defended the system as a “clear congressional directive to break down information silos between government agencies.” Sooknanan called those arguments “border on the absurd.”

The ruling can be appealed. The administration is expected to do so. But for now, the database that was used to remove American citizens from voter rolls five months before a midterm election has been declared unlawful by a federal court.