President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is asking the Supreme Court of the United States to intervene to allow the government to use an updated verification system, known as the SAVE program, to remove foreign nationals and other ineligible voters from state voter rolls.
On Tuesday, Solicitor General John Sauer wrote to SCOTUS asking the justices to stay an order from Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by former President Joe Biden.
In June, Sooknanan issued an order preventing the government from using an updated Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. The updates greatly streamlined the process for states to purge voter rolls of ineligible voters.
According to Sauer, Sooknanan’s order is “indefensible” and “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by States to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
“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 writes to SCOTUS.
Sooknanan, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, wrote in her order that use of the updated SAVE program “implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote,” arguing that “the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
“This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens,” Sooknanan wrote.
The case is League of Women Voters et al v. DHS, No. 26A in the Supreme Court of the United States.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected].
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