Supreme Court restores Trump's mass voter verification system

…majority was misreading federal law. She also pointed to US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s findings that legal voters were having their registrations revoked or questioned. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that " the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the non-existent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take. " The Trump administration's data-sharing arrangement is one in a series of actions boosting the federal government's involvement in voting ahead of November's midterm elections as Trump's fellow Republicans seek to…

…conduct searches using individuals' Social Security numbers. In a social media post on Friday, James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, replied to a post about the court's order, saying, " Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting. " Since the federal database was expanded, several Republican-led states compared their voter lists to the database, and some voters flagged as potential non-citizens have had their registrations cancelled. The decision…

…privacy and other US laws. In a June ruling blocking the revamped database, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., said the system was haphazardly assembled and contained unreliable citizenship data. " 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 ," Sooknanan wrote. "This court cannot stand idly by while that happens." The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 ruling on September 4 declined to halt Sooknanan's ruling, prompting the…