A federal judge in Florida ordered the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday to allow four Republican-led states to continue accessing an expanded federal voter verification database, creating a direct conflict with a recent ruling from a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that blocked states from using the same system.
In a ruling Tuesday, Judge T. Kent Wetherell II of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said Florida could continue implementing a 2025 settlement agreement with DHS that allows the state to use an expanded version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program to verify voter eligibility.
Wetherell wrote that the agreement permits Florida to continue “improving and modernizing” the federal citizenship database, including by integrating Social Security Administration data. Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana are also covered under the settlement.
The dispute stems from a 2024 lawsuit filed by Florida against the Biden administration, alleging the federal government failed to provide sufficient citizenship and immigration data to help states maintain accurate voter rolls. After Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration expanded the SAVE program as part of a broader effort to verify voter eligibility and settled the lawsuit, granting the states access to the enhanced database.
But roughly two weeks ago, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the expansion violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act, issuing an order that blocked DHS from providing states access to the expanded system.
In her opinion, Sooknanan, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, said federal agencies had unlawfully created a centralized database containing sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers and citizenship records, in an effort to comply with an executive order on election administration. She wrote that the database relied on information the government knew could be unreliable and that states were already using it to remove eligible U.S. citizens from voter rolls.
“This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote,” she wrote in her opinion. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
Wetherell acknowledged that the two rulings place DHS in an untenable position.
“The court understands that this puts defendants in a bind because they are subject to two contradictory orders—one from this court requiring them to include certain features in the SAVE system and one from Judge Sooknanan prohibiting them from doing so,” Wetherell wrote. “One of the orders has to give.”
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He added that his court was not bound by Sooknanan’s decision and disagreed with its legal conclusions.
It remains unclear how DHS will reconcile the conflicting court orders or whether the dispute will be appealed quickly to a federal appeals court for resolution.