Courts, Rights Group Challenge Trump Voter Database Efforts

A federal appeals court has refused to immediately restore the Trump administration’s expanded SAVE database for checking voter rolls, leaving in place a lower-court ruling that found the program likely exceeded federal authority and violated privacy and administrative laws. The D.C. Circuit expedited the broader appeal, but the decision remains a setback for the administration’s efforts to identify and remove alleged noncitizens from voter rolls before the midterm elections. Separately, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, backed by the UCLA Voting Rights Project, sued the administration over alleged efforts to match voter data with federal databases, arguing that outdated or incomplete records could wrongly flag naturalized U.S. citizens and intimidate eligible voters. DHS says its database reviews are intended to protect election integrity and has cited large numbers of alleged noncitizen registrations, while California officials and voting-rights advocates have questioned the figures and the reliability and legality of the data matching.