Supreme Court restores Trump voter checks

The US Supreme ​Court revived on Friday an expanded immigration database that President Donald Trump's ​administration said aims to combat voting by non-citizens but critics contend could disenfranchise eligible voters.
The justices granted the Justice Department's request to block a judge's order that had stopped state officials from using Social Security numbers and other information to conduct sweeping checks of the citizenship status of registered voters against federal records.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from Friday's order.
The majority said the plaintiffs' arguments likely fail because federal law expressly authorises the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration.
The 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 in which Trump's fellow Republicans seek to maintain ⁠control of Congress. The US Constitution gives individual states the primary authority to run and administer elections.
The Department of Homeland Security last year redesigned a federal database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify a person's citizenship and immigration status. The revamp allowed users to search many records at a time and to conduct searches using individuals' Social Security numbers.
Since then, several Republican-led ‌states have compared their voter lists to the database, and some voters flagged as potential non-citizens ​have had their registrations cancelled.
Critics say such ⁠election-related actions by Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an attempt to gain political advantage by narrowing ​the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.
Trump has ‌carried out hardline policies toward immigration and has made false claims of widespread voting fraud, including in his 2020 election loss to Democratic former president Joe Biden.
Advocacy groups that sued to block the revised SAVE system said that the new approach has resulted in ​people who were wrongfully identified as non-citizens being kicked off voter rolls. They have argued that SAVE can be outdated, meaning immigrants who have become naturalised US citizens and are thus eligible to vote are sometimes labelled as non-citizens.
The modified system's overall error rate is not publicly known. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department did not provide that information when asked.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the plaintiffs, called Friday's decision 'profoundly disappointing,' saying it puts Americans 'at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration's unreliable voter purge database weeks before the ‌midterm elections.'
In a dissent on Friday that was joined by her two fellow liberal justices, 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.'
In their ​Supreme Court filing, ‌the ⁠advocacy groups cited a Travis County, Texas, election official who said 25 per cent of the system's non-citizen matches there involved people who had already proven their US citizenship, and news reports finding that at least 81 per cent of the system's responses in St Louis County, Missouri, were erroneous. - Reuters