Voting groups ask court for immediate halt to Trump admin’s SAVE database overhaul
Voting rights groups are asking a court to block an ongoing Trump administration effort to merge disparate federal and state voter data into a massive citizenship and voter fraud database.
Last week, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and five individuals sued the federal government in D.C. District Court, saying it was ignoring decades of federal privacy law to create enormous “national data banks” of personal information on Americans.
On Tuesday, the coalition, represented by Democracy Forward Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Fair Elections Center, asked the court for an emergency injunction to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements into an immense technological tool to track potential noncitizens registered to vote. Until this year, SAVE was an incomplete and limited federal database meant to track immigrants seeking federal benefits.
“This administration’s attempt to manipulate federal data systems to unlawfully target its own citizens and purge voters is one of the most serious threats to free and fair elections in decades,” Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said in a statement. “The League is asking the court to act swiftly to stop this abuse of power before it disenfranchises lawful voters. Every citizen deserves privacy, fairness, and the freedom to vote without fear of government interference.”
In an Oct. 7 court filing, the groups said an immediate injunction was needed to prevent permanent privacy harms due to the “illegal and secretive consolidation of millions of Americans’ sensitive personal data across government agencies into centralized data systems” through SAVE.
“While Plaintiffs’ Complaint challenges a broader set of Defendants’ unlawful data consolidation, Plaintiffs here seek emergency relief concerning one particularly harmful and urgent facet of Defendants’ conduct: their overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (“SAVE”) system,” the groups wrote.
In addition to SAVE, the lawsuit also claims the existence of “at least one other Interagency Data System that consolidates other data sources from around the government that might have information concerning immigrants into a centralized ‘data lake’ housed at” U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services.
Federal agencies collect massive amounts of data on Americans as part of their work, but the groups argue the 1974 Privacy Act and other privacy laws were explicitly designed to prevent the kind of large, centralized federal datasets on Americans the administration is putting together. Subsequent legislative updates in 1988 amended the Privacy Act to specifically prohibit the use of “computer matching programs” that compare data across different agencies without informing Congress or publicizing the written agreements between agencies.
“For decades, these protections have guarded against improper data pooling across federal agencies, preventing the government from building a potentially dangerous tool for surveilling and investigating Americans without guardrails,” the voting groups wrote. “Until now.”
As CyberScoop reported earlier this year, USCIS, along with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), began merging SAVE data with other major federal data streams — including federal Social Security data — while removing fees and building in the technical capacity for states to conduct easier, bulk searches of voters against the database. The Department of Justice has sought voter data from all 50 states, with some cooperating and others refusing. Last month, the administration sued six states to force them to hand over voter data that would be used in SAVE.
Less than a week before the suit was filed, the Social Security Administration released a redacted copy of its information-sharing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, which claims that “personnel have been directed to comply, to the maximum extent possible and permissible under law … taking into account federal statutory requirements, including the Privacy Act of 1974 … as well as other laws, rules, regulations, policies, and requirements regarding verification, information sharing, and confidentiality.”
Administration officials say the overhaul is needed to crack down on instances of noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud, but such fraud is exceedingly rare outside a handful of isolated cases, as numerous academic studies and post-election audits have proven.
DOGE officials were singled out in the lawsuit for particularly egregious violations, accused of embarking on a “months-long campaign to access, collect and consolidate vast troves of personal data about millions of U.S. citizens and residents stored at multiple federal agencies.”
An executive order from the Trump administration earlier this year sought to explicitly empower the DOGE administrator, along with DHS, to “review” state voter registration lists and other records to identify noncitizen voters. That order is still the subject of ongoing lawsuits challenging its legality.
In this case, the plaintiffs claim the need for emergency relief is urgent as the Trump administration is simultaneously challenging the accuracy of state voter rolls in courts across the country, while “encouraging and enabling states to use unreliable [Social Security Administration] citizenship data pooled in the overhauled SAVE system to begin purging voter rolls ahead of fast-approaching November elections and to open criminal investigations of alleged non-citizen voting.”
“Both the ongoing misuse of Plaintiffs’ sensitive SSA data through the overhauled SAVE system, and the increased risk of cybertheft and additional misuse, qualify as irreparable injuries,” the filing states.
