Overview
- The decision by U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan on Monday set aside the 2025 modifications to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, halting the government's use of the revamped system to verify citizenship on voter rolls.
- The court found the overhaul violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act because it disclosed SSA records, bypassed required privacy limits, and was adopted without lawful procedure.
- The 2025 changes had added natural-born citizens to SAVE, granted access to Social Security records including Social Security numbers, and enabled bulk searches by state and federal users—features the judge said made the database a centralized clearinghouse for sensitive data.
- States had run voter lists through the modified SAVE and some eligible voters were wrongly flagged as noncitizens and had registrations cancelled, a harm the court cited when describing risks to the right to vote.
- The ruling does not resolve separate Justice Department efforts to obtain unredacted state voter files or the status of cancelled registrations, and it leaves open further remedies and litigation over restoration and future data sharing.