The Supreme Court of the United States has given the green light this Friday to the Administration of Donald Trump to use an expanded federal database with information about citizenship, designed to verify if voters meet the requirements to participate in the midterm elections on November 3.
The high court, with a conservative majority, has made this decision with the support of six of its nine justices, upon considering an emergency petition from the Government. This intervention overturns previous rulings from lower courts that had found that the Executive was making inappropriate use of said database linked to Social Security and violated the privacy of citizens.
Specifically, the Supreme Court's ruling emphasizes that the order from Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, which halted the expansion of the database, "hinders the efforts of the federal Government to assist state and local agencies in the proper management of the midterm elections."
At the same time, the resolution dismisses the objection related to the protection of personal data, considering that Congress had already authorized the Department of Homeland Security to access Social Security information.
With this ruling, the Trump Administration is enabled to activate the system in the weeks leading up to the November elections. The decision comes just ten days after the Supreme Court dealt a setback to the president by preventing him from using the Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting in these elections.
The initiative promoted by Trump through a presidential decree last year involves the collection of data from the Social Security Administration —including information related to American citizens— and empowers states to conduct mass inquiries in order to clean up their voter rolls, despite federal legislation prohibiting states from removing "systematically" people from the voter rolls 90 days before an election.
The president maintains that his goal is to prevent non-U.S. citizens from participating in voting, although various studies have repeatedly shown that this type of fraud is very uncommon.
The plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters, have warned that the modifications pushed by Trump endanger sensitive data of Americans and are causing the erroneous cancellation of voter registrations of citizens entitled to vote.