Supreme Court allows Trump’s voter verification database

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 handed the Trump administration a win in its effort to increase federal involvement in the midterm elections.

An ideologically divided court allowed use of a revamped immigration database to check the accuracy of state voter rolls, rejecting a federal judge’s ruling that the database risks disenfranchising eligible voters and ignores privacy safeguards.

A majority said in the unsigned opinion that the federal government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials to verify a voter’s citizenship. The judge’s order, the majority said, “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

The court's three liberal justices dissented.

The impact of the ruling is limited for the midterm elections because federal law prohibits election officials from mass clearings of their voter rolls this close to an election.

That means the database can be used only for inquiries about individual voters.

Still, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent that “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/travel/