75-page ruling halts Trump voter verification tool SAVE, cites Privacy Act

For election law and privacy practitioners, this decision provides a definitive interpretation of the Privacy Act's limits on government data aggregation. It sets critical precedent regarding the balance between election integrity measures and individual voting rights, directly impacting ongoing litigation over voter roll purges.

On June 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan issued a sweeping 75-page ruling declaring the Trump administration’s revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system unlawful and immediately blocking its use. The decision strikes at the heart of President Trump’s election integrity agenda, specifically the second election executive order signed earlier this year that positioned SAVE as a central mechanism for states to verify voter citizenship and purge suspected noncitizens from rolls. The ruling is the culmination of a lawsuit brought by advocacy groups who argued the overhauled database violated the Privacy Act and Congressional prohibitions against centralized personal data collection, while also threatening to disenfranchise eligible voters, particularly naturalized American citizens.

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But beginning in 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with assistance from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), radically transformed the system.

SAVE was originally a relatively modest tool operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), used by state and federal agencies to perform individual checks on whether a foreign-born individual was eligible for certain government benefits. But beginning in 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with assistance from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), radically transformed the system. They enabled bulk-check capabilities, allowing entire state voter registration lists to be run through SAVE at once. More controversially, they linked SAVE for the first time to Social Security Administration (SSA) records and added the personal data of American-born citizens, effectively creating a massive federal database containing sensitive information on millions of Americans, including citizenship data that multiple federal agencies knew to be unreliable.

Judge Sooknanan’s ruling is unsparing in its condemnation. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she wrote. She noted that Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information, and that the agencies responsible for creating the SAVE database “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.” The 75-page order details how the overhauled SAVE system “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

The practical consequences of the SAVE expansion were already being felt before the ruling. Several states submitted their entire voter rolls for screening, and NPR reported that numerous American citizens who were foreign-born were mistakenly flagged as potential noncitizens. These false positives raised the specter of eligible voters being wrongfully purged or challenged. While the administration had apparently wound down bulk checking in the days immediately prior to the ruling, the order now formally prohibits any future use of the overhauled SAVE in its current form.

The legal implications are profound. The ruling rests on an interpretation of the Privacy Act of 1974 that strictly limits the creation of centralized federal databases of personal information, a safeguard rooted in post-Watergate reforms. It also sets a key precedent for the limits of executive branch authority in repurposing existing data systems without proper public notice or statutory authorization. For the Trump administration, the loss is not just logistical but symbolic; SAVE was a flagship initiative of the second election integrity order, and its invalidation casts a shadow over other federal efforts to mandate voter citizenship verification. DHS General Counsel James Percival dismissed the decision on social media, saying, “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” signaling an all-but-certain appeal.