US Supreme Court clears Trump administration’s voter-roll database request

The US Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to use a federal database to help identify potential non-citizens on voter rolls, granting the administration a victory ahead of the November midterm elections. A majority of the nine justices joined an unsigned opinion issued on Friday. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.

The ruling lifted a lower-court order that had blocked the use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, known as SAVE. SAVE is used to establish citizenship status when determining eligibility for government benefits. The Supreme Court said the federal government has an obligation to respond when state and local election officials ask it to verify voters’ citizenship.

The court also said the lower-court order prevented the federal government from using the programme it considered best suited to the task. The ruling does not itself establish that non-citizens have voted illegally, but permits the database to be used in voter-roll verification. President Donald Trump has for years claimed that non-citizens vote in US elections and that mail-in ballots are vulnerable to fraud.

The decision comes after a separate Supreme Court ruling earlier this month blocked a Trump plan that would have restricted mail-in voting. Election experts quoted in the report said the latest decision was unlikely to have a major effect on the midterms because most states prohibit voter purges during the 90 days before an election. Rick Hasen, a University of California, Los Angeles law professor, said both the majority and dissent expected the case to have limited impact.