US Supreme court allows Trump to use federal database to check voter register

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The US Supreme Court on Friday granted a Trump administration request to allow the use of a federal database to weed out potential non-citizens from the voter rolls.

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A majority of the nine justices on the top court joined the unsigned opinion, providing a victory to President Donald Trump ahead of the November midterm elections.

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The three liberal justices on the conservative-dominated court dissented.

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Trump has claimed for years that many non-citizens vote in US elections and that mail-in ballots are vulnerable to fraud.

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Friday’s Supreme Court decision lifted a lower court order that had blocked the use of a Department of Homeland Security program known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) to verify the citizenship of individuals on the voter rolls.

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SAVE is used to identify citizenship status to determine whether someone is eligible for benefits.

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In its ruling, the Supreme Court said the federal government “has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.”

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The lower court order blocking the use of SAVE “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

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Election experts said the ruling is unlikely to have a major impact on the November elections because most US states ban purges of voters 90 days ahead of an election.

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“Both the majority and dissent agree that this case is likely to have limited impact on the midterms,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a blog post. “Compared to the recent mail-in voting case, this one is not very important substantively.”

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Hasen was referring to a Supreme Court decision earlier this month that blocked a Trump plan that would have restricted the use of mail-in ballots.

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Trump reacted furiously to that ruling calling it “horrible” and “highly political” in a Truth Social post.

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AFP

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