The Trump administration on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to use a federal citizenship database to help spot invalid voters ahead of the midterm elections.
The administration is currently blocked from rolling out the tool, which the administration proposed using as part of a larger effort by President Trump to enact additional screening of voters ahead of November.
If the justices allow the administration to proceed, states could use the Department of Homeland Security database to check voter information against federal citizenship and Social Security records.
The emergency application to the justices marks the latest in a dizzying series of legal developments in the fight over the Trump administration’s push to upend mail-in voting procedures, even as some states begin sending out their ballots.
The court gave the challengers until next Tuesday to respond.
“The stakes could not be higher: Millions of Americans’ sensitive personal information and the integrity of our elections are on the line, just weeks before the midterm elections,” said Skye Perryman, the president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, which represents the challengers.
Mr. Trump has long raised skepticism about mail voting, and he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that fraud is rampant among mail votes, including by noncitizens, who cannot legally vote in federal elections.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, asked the justices to lift a lower court freeze blocking the citizenship database. He called the court’s freeze “an indefensible order that threatens the integrity of upcoming elections” by limiting the federal government from using Social Security data “when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
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The request was the latest emergency application to the court related to the legality of the president’s efforts to use the federal government to impose voting restrictions.
On Sunday morning, Trump administration lawyers asked the justices to allow the U.S. Postal Service to move ahead with a plan to impose new screening on ballots sent through the mail. A group of Democratic state attorneys general and voting rights organizations challenging the Postal Service plan will respond to that filing by Wednesday.
They argue that the administration’s plan violates the Constitution, allowing the executive to intrude on the authority of states and Congress. The administration has said that the Postal Service is acting lawfully.
The new emergency application filed Monday focuses on the legality of an expansion of a Department of Homeland Security database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which the government described in court filings as “an online service that enables users to verify a person’s citizenship status, often within seconds.”
The federal database was created in 1986 as a way to enable the federal government and state and local officials to search for immigration status to help determine eligibility for a range of public benefits.
The Trump administration has expanded the database, including by folding in data from the Social Security Administration, which challengers assert can be unreliable and incomplete. They also argue that it would violate privacy protections.
Voting rights groups sued last year to challenge Mr. Trump’s overhaul of the database, arguing that the administration was illegally transforming the system into a nationwide citizenship bank that could be used for states to purge voter rolls. The groups argued that errors in the data could disenfranchise valid voters if it is used in an election context.
On Friday, a divided panel of federal appeals court judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed to keep in place a temporary freeze on access to the database. The majority found that the federal government had not shown that the system could be used without violating laws aimed at shielding Social Security information.
