A federal judge appointed by President Joe Biden has halted the Trump administration’s effort to use an upgraded federal verification system to help states identify and remove noncitizens from voter registration rolls.

In a ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia barred the administration from implementing changes to the federal SAVE program that were intended to make citizenship verification faster and more accessible for election officials.

The revised version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program allowed states to confirm voter eligibility without requiring all nine digits of an applicant’s Social Security number, a change supporters said would streamline efforts to ensure that only eligible citizens cast ballots in federal elections.

In her decision, Sooknanan argued that the case raised serious concerns involving both voter rights and the protection of private personal information.

“This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote,” Sooknanan, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, wrote:

“In the past year, several federal agencies have joined forces to create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and other sensitive data.

“But decades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank. And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections. The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. 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. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The ruling marked a significant setback for the administration’s election-integrity efforts, which officials said were designed to help states more effectively verify voter citizenship and prevent unlawful voting.

Previously, a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services defended the revised system, telling Breitbart News that the updated SAVE program was necessary to ensure “America’s elections are reserved exclusively for American citizens.”

The legal battle is expected to continue as the administration and its allies seek to preserve the changes, while opponents argue the system risks disenfranchising eligible voters and undermining longstanding federal privacy protections.

{Matzav.com}