A federal judge finds a Trump data system to verify voters is unlawful

Elections A federal judge finds a Trump data system to verify voters is unlawful June 22, 20266:25 PM ET By  Jude Joffe-Block Voting booths in Bangor, Maine CJ Gunther/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption CJ Gunther/Getty Images A federal judge on Monday ruled that a Trump administration project to aggregate Americans' personal data to check voter eligibility is unlawful, and the resulting data tool cannot be used in its current form. Several states have already run their entire voter lists through the system, known as SAVE, that was overhauled by the Trump administration last year. While the tool is supposed to flag potential noncitizens and deceased voters, a number of American citizens who are foreign-born have been mistakenly flagged as potential noncitizens by SAVE. "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," U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, wrote in her 75-page ruling. "This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens." Sponsor Message NPR was the first outlet to report on the federal government's massive expansion of SAVE to turn it into a tool to check the citizenship of all Americans, and how the government had not followed required protocols to provide public notice under the Privacy Act. SAVE is run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and was previously used by state and federal agencies to check whether a foreign-born individual was eligible for certain government benefits. Those checks were done one by one. Last year, USCIS' parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with the help of DOGE, made it possible to perform bulk checks on SAVE. Further changes linked SAVE to Social Security Administration data for the first time and added the records of American-born citizens. Sooknanan wrote in her ruling that in performing this overhaul, federal agencies "haphazardly combined and repurpos...