Trump administration can use revamped voter screening tool for now, SCOTUS rules

Driving the news: The high court's majority said the Federal Government "has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters."

• The majority concluded the lower court's block "prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task."

What they're saying: The League of Women Voters called the decision "profoundly disappointing," saying it "puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration's unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections."

• "However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws. We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans' voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands."

The other side: DHS General Counsel James Percival wrote on X, "Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting."

Catch up quick: The Trump administration revamped the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) service, an immigration tool that was long used to verify benefit eligibility, into a system to assess voter eligibility last year.

• A key part of that effort was expanding SAVE queries using Social Security Administration data and allowing bulk searches.
• Voting rights and privacy advocates sued, alleging the "dramatic changes far exceed the SAVE system's limited authorized scope and functionality."
• U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan concluded the administration acted unlawfully and "haphazardly combined and repurposed" Americans' data, including "unreliable" citizenship data.

Friction point: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — dissented, pointing in part to the potential for disenfranchisement, as discussed before the lower court.

• Most states are barred from systematic voter purges within 90 days of a federal election, Jackson noted, making it "hard to see how the Government is harmed pending the completion of the court proceedings below when SAVE's application to the upcoming elections will already be limited."
• But she added, "In my view, however, the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take."

Flashback: The decision comes after the Supreme Court dealt the administration a loss earlier this month in striking down the U.S. Postal Service's rule restructuring mail-in voting.

• At the time, Trump lashed out, writing on Truth Social that "[t]he Supreme Court has really let our Country down!"

Go deeper: Trump is pulling every lever to reshape U.S. elections

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional details throughout.