The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to lift a lower court order barring the implementation of a voter verification system that would combine Social Security information with citizenship records.
The administration modified the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database last year to combine citizenship and Social Security records to improve the speed and reliability of verifying a person’s citizenship status. The change was met with lawsuits from left-wing groups that argued it violated privacy laws, among other federal statutes. A federal district judge ruled in favor of the groups suing the administration in June, a ruling that a federal appeals court panel affirmed last week. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the high court should halt the “indefensible order,” which he claims “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections” by unlawfully limiting the federal government’s authority to use Social Security data.
“The order will irreparably harm the federal government, the States, and the public by depriving the government of an effective tool to verify the eligibility of registered voters and benefits applicants under various state and federal programs,” Sauer wrote.
Sauer also argued that the pair of lower federal courts exceeded their authority to issue an order barring the use of Social Security data with citizenship records for the SAVE system, and that the expansion of the system complies with federal law, contrary to the lower court rulings.
“The district court’s order warrants review because it universally vacates an important governmental policy—the improvement
of a system that has processed millions of citizenship-verification requests every week and that is used for purposes ranging from maintaining voter rolls to ensuring that ineligible aliens do not wrongly receive federal benefits,” Sauer wrote, asking for the Supreme Court to side with the Trump administration.
The Supreme Court has not outlined a timetable for a ruling on the emergency docket.
The petition from the Department of Justice marks the latest instance of the Trump administration or a Republican-aligned group asking the Supreme Court to halt an adverse election- or voting-related lower-court ruling, less than two months before the hotly contested midterm elections. Two key election-related emergency petitions remain outstanding, with one filed by the DOJ and one filed by Republicans in Missouri.
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The Justice Department is awaiting a ruling on a petition asking the high court to allow a new U.S. Postal Service mail ballot rule to go into effect, after a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked it as states prepare to send out mail ballots for the upcoming elections.
Missouri Republicans filed an emergency petition late Friday asking the Supreme Court to reinstate a new congressional map for the state that would likely net the GOP a seat in the House of Representatives. The petition is an appeal of a Missouri Supreme Court ruling last week that reinstated the old congressional map for the November election, despite the August primary elections being held under the new map. The unprecedented ruling was appealed at a rapid pace, with ballots set to be printed in the coming weeks.