Durbin Responds As Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration To Proceed With Voter Screening Database
The emergency ruling lets states use the SAVE database, which Durbin says contains errors, to screen voter rolls less than six weeks before the midterm election.
NEW ORLEANS – U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released the following statement after the Supreme Court ruled today that the Trump Administration can move forward with an expansive and flawed database that states can use for potential voter purges. The database attempts to combine citizenship information, Social Security numbers, and other sensitive data about millions of Americans and is rife with errors:
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“The Supreme Court just allowed the Trump Administration to weaponize an unreliable database against Americans’ fundamental right to vote less than six weeks before a consequential midterm election. With his poll numbers lagging, Donald Trump continues to attack Americans’ right to vote because he knows his party can’t win on the issues.
“Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and every eligible voter across America has the right to cast a ballot—and should be able to do so without fear of being wrongly purged from the voting rolls. The right to vote is fundamental to our nation’s democracy, and President Trump’s efforts to chip away at that fundamental right and interfere with the election must be rejected.”
In an unsigned per curiam opinion, over the objections of at least three dissenting justices, a majority of the Court granted a request for emergency relief from the Justice Department to stay a June ruling which had blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) overhauled database—called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)—which the Administration allows states and localities to use to verify citizenship and immigration status of registered voters. As Justice Jackson pointed out in her dissent, the Court “focuse[d] only on the harms the Government will purportedly suffer absent a stay, disregarding the harms that the modified SAVE system has caused, and will likely continue to cause, to lawful voters.”
In April, Durbin, along with U.S. Senators Alex Padilla (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee; Gary Peters (D-MI), Ranking Member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led 24 of their Democratic colleagues in demanding DHS and the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) follow existing federal law over a troubling, unconstitutional March 31 Executive Order signed by President Trump. The directive risked disenfranchising eligible voters, including by requiring DHS to create eligible voter lists—which is an administrative function reserved primarily for the states. Under the order, DHS is required to use data from the SAVE program that incorporates incorrect and out-of-date citizenship information from SSA, which DHS has acknowledged may produce inaccurate citizenship verification results.
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