Judge blocks Trump’s use of revamped immigration database for voter checks

NEW YORK, June 22 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped version of an immigration database to check the accuracy of state voter rolls, dealing a blow to U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to increase the federal government’s role in elections ahead of the November midterm elections.

Last year, in response to Trump’s executive order allowing state and local authorities to verify the immigration status of voters, ‌the Department of the Interior ⁠Security revamped the system it uses to verify individuals’ citizenship and immigration status to allow users to search records in bulk.

In her 75-page decision Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., sided with voting rights and privacy advocates who argued that an overhaul of the system known as “SAVE” makes it less accurate and risks disenfranchising eligible voters.

The decision comes as Trump’s Republicans are engaged in a bitter fight to keep control of both houses of Congress in the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Sooknanan is an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump and his allies have long claimed that states are not doing enough to prevent voter fraud, even though state audits and academic studies have found it to be rare. Trump falsely argues that his loss in the 2020 election was due to fraud.

Critics say Republicans are driven less by concerns about election security than by an effort to gain political advantage by narrowing the electorate, shrinking the electorate and risking the disenfranchisement of mostly Democratic-leaning voters.

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder)