Voting rights groups are asking a court to block an ongoing Trump administration effort to merge disparate federal and state voter data into a massive citizenship and voter fraud database.

Last week, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and five individuals sued the federal government in D.C. District Court, saying it was ignoring decades of federal privacy law to create enormous “national data banks” of personal information on Americans.

On Tuesday, the coalition, represented by Democracy Forward Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Fair Elections Center, asked the court for an emergency injunction to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements into an immense technological tool to track potential noncitizens registered to vote. Until this year, SAVE was an incomplete and limited federal database meant to track immigrants seeking federal benefits.

“This administration’s attempt to manipulate federal data systems to unlawfully target its own citizens and purge voters is one of the most serious threats to free and fair elections in decades,” Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said in a statement. “The League is asking the court to act swiftly to stop this abuse of power before it disenfranchises lawful voters. Every citizen deserves privacy, fairness, and the freedom to vote without fear of government interference.”

In an Oct. 7 court filing, the groups said an immediate injunction was needed to prevent permanent privacy harms due to the “illegal and secretive consolidation of millions of Americans’ sensitive personal data across government agencies into centralized data systems” through SAVE.

“While Plaintiffs’ Complaint challenges a broader set of Defendants’ unlawful data consolidation, Plaintiffs here seek emergency relief concerning one particularly harmful and urgent facet of Defendants’ conduct: their overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (“SAVE”) system,” the groups wrote.

In addition to SAVE, the lawsuit also claims the existence of “at least one other Interagency Data System that consolidates other data sources from around the government that might have information concerning immigrants into a centralized ‘data lake’ housed at” U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services.

Federal agencies collect massive amounts of data on Americans as part of their work, but the groups argue the 1974 Privacy Act and other privacy laws were explicitly designed to prevent the kind of large, centralized federal datasets on Americans the administration is putting together. Subsequent legislative updates in 1988 amended the Privacy Act to specifically prohibit the use of “computer matching programs” that compare data across different agencies without informing Congress or publicizing the written agreements between agencies.

“For decades, these protections have guarded against improper data pooling across federal agencies, preventing the government from building a potentially dangerous tool for surveilling and investigating Americans without guardrails,” the voting groups wrote. “Until now.”

As CyberScoop reported earlier this year, USCIS, along with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), began merging SAVE data with other major federal data streams — including federal Social Security data — while removing fees and building in the technical capacity for states to conduct easier, bulk searches of voters against the database. The Department of Justice has sought voter data from all 50 states, with some cooperating and others refusing. Last month, the administration sued six states to force them to hand over voter data that would be used in SAVE.

Less than a week before the suit was filed, the Social Security Administration released a redacted copy of its information-sharing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, which claims that “personnel have been directed to comply, to the maximum extent possible and permissible under law … taking into account federal statutory requirements, including the Privacy Act of 1974 … as well as other laws, rules, regulations, policies, and requirements regarding verification, information sharing, and confidentiality.”

Administration officials say the overhaul is needed to crack down on instances of noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud, but such fraud is exceedingly rare outside a handful of isolated cases, as numerous academic studies and post-election audits have proven.

DOGE officials were singled out in the lawsuit for particularly egregious violations, accused of embarking on a “months-long campaign to access, collect and consolidate vast troves of personal data about millions of U.S. citizens and residents stored at multiple federal agencies.”

An executive order from the Trump administration earlier this year sought to explicitly empower the DOGE administrator, along with DHS, to “review” state voter registration lists and other records to identify noncitizen voters. That order is still the subject of ongoing lawsuits challenging its legality.

In this case, the plaintiffs claim the need for emergency relief is urgent as the Trump administration is simultaneously challenging the accuracy of state voter rolls in courts across the country, while “encouraging and enabling states to use unreliable [Social Security Administration] citizenship data pooled in the overhauled SAVE system to begin purging voter rolls ahead of fast-approaching November elections and to open criminal investigations of alleged non-citizen voting.”

“Both the ongoing misuse of Plaintiffs’ sensitive SSA data through the overhauled SAVE system, and the increased risk of cybertheft and additional misuse, qualify as irreparable injuries,” the filing states.

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Election officials should brace for direct attacks from the Trump administration and its state GOP allies on the integrity of U.S. elections — and plan for the possibility that federal agencies once charged with protecting elections will leverage their authorities to interfere in the process, a voting rights nonprofit warned.

In a report released Wednesday, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice say the Trump administration’s actions suggest that the White House is preparing for an unprecedented federal intervention in the way elections are administered ahead of 2026 and 2028.

Those interventions include attempts to enact state-level bans or restrictions on mail-in voting, the use of lawsuits or criminal charges against election officials who don’t follow President Donald Trump’s orders, pushing mass state voter roll purges based on potentially inaccurate citizenship data, the deployment of the military in American cities and towns to  intimidate voters and state officials, and the potential decertification or seizure of voting machines.

The scenarios are all based on actions the administration has already taken this year or in its first term, statements made by Trump and his aides, lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice and supporting efforts from Republican-led state legislatures.

Lawrence Norden, vice president for the elections and government program at the Brennan Center and one of the report’s authors, told CyberScoop that the document is targeted at three audiences who will be on the front lines in Trump’s war for control over elections: state election officials, policymakers and the public at large.

In 2020, the public was subjected to a deluge of false and unproven claims around election fraud, dead voters and hacked voting machines. While those claims had limited effect influencing voters outside of Trump’s orbit, many federal officials — including Chris Krebs, his own nominee for cybersecurity and election security chief — contradicted his claims of mass fraud. This April, Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate Krebs for his statements about the 2020 election.

This year, the Department of Homeland Security hired Marci McCarthy and Heather Honey, who both actively tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. McCarthy is now the top public affairs official at CISA, while Honey was recently named to a position overseeing election security efforts at DHS. Other agencies, like the FBI and the DOJ, have shifted from supporting state elections to investigating and suing election offices over their voter registration practices.

Whatever the administration ends up doing, Norden said it would be wise to plan ahead for different possibilities.

“One of the most effective ways to defeat misleading or false information is to call it out ahead of time, so when it comes to [dubious] reports we might see from government agencies, better to call it out now and say that this is part of a concerted effort and there are reasons not to trust it,” Norden said.

Meanwhile, he said policymakers at the state level “need to be planning and preparing for the next steps” to protect their constitutional rights while running upcoming elections.

“So being ready to have the backs of their election officials, being ready for politicized investigations that may come, being ready for efforts to interfere in the ability of election officials to run their elections according to state law, they need to be preparing for that now,” Norden said.

Trump uses public doubt and skepticism as policy fuel

One possibility floated in the report is the administration moving to decertify voting machines used in some or most states through the Election Assistance Commission. Last week, Trump argued against mail-in ballots and “voting machines,” claiming an executive order that limited their use would soon be issued. The EAC is responsible for overseeing the labs that test and certify voting machines nationwide to ensure they are secure and meet the necessary standards.

While the White House later walked back the possibility of an executive order, the administration has already attempted to compel the EAC to alter voter registration forms to require proof of citizenship and withhold federal funding to states that do not cooperate with federal agencies on election-related matters. A federal judge has nullified parts of that order. 

Such certifications are technically voluntary on the part of voting machine manufacturers, but states and localities have overwhelmingly treated them as industry standard when purchasing their machines. Depending on the timing, the mass decertification of certain systems ahead of an election could inject chaos among states, which cannot easily or quickly buy, replace, and test new voting equipment.

For states that do count votes using decertified machines, it could lead the public and political leaders to question the legitimacy of future results. This may give the Trump administration more support to sow doubt and challenge how states run their elections, the type of ballots they accept and how they process vote counts.

The perception of voting impropriety in any future messaging from the Trump administration, even if it is false, is a key issue states will also have to contend with. All politicians use repetition in their political messaging, but for Trump, it is especially crucial to how he communicates, regardless of the actual facts.

Stacy Rosenberg, an associate teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon’s public policy school, told CyberScoop that Trump’s rhetorical style requires aggressive repetition around simple themes — like mass noncitizen voting and poorly maintained voter rolls —, because they help create the political will for the administration and its allies to take more extreme actions that couldn’t otherwise be justified based on law or precedent.

“The attempt to have federalized voting is not something we typically see in the United States, so when elections are questioned, there may be people who say, ‘well, it’s justified for the federal government to come in and make changes,’” Rosenberg said. “We’ll have to see how the courts handle that. It doesn’t really fall into the domain of an executive order, so I think the question is: what can they do that the courts will allow?” 

Norden said that while it’s clear the president doesn’t have the kind of direct authority over state-run elections he’s claiming, he does have the power to “both mislead and to intimidate people, whether it’s election officials or voters.”

“The good news is that if we see them for what they are, those are limited powers,” Norden said. “As long as the states step up and defend their elections, as long as voters come out and vote, that’s not enough to undermine elections. But we have to see what’s happening for [that defense] to be effective.”

In terms of counter messaging on the part of states, Rosenberg said much will rest on how courts respond to federal challenges, but from a strategy perspective “the number one thing [election officials] have to know is, you’re going to be called fake news.”

The Trump White House has “continued that line of attack through his first term to his present day. The way they want to control the message by saying everyone else’s message is false is a persistent strategy,” she said.

Pointing to the administration’s previous efforts to strong-arm universities and law firms, Rosenberg noted that while no one was left unscathed, those who fared best tended to confront Trump head-on rather than try to accommodate him.

“I think all you can do is stand your ground, file your lawsuits or counter lawsuits as you need to, but I think you need to continue to do the ethical hard work that you’ve done prior to the administration,” she said.

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As the Trump administration has sought to muscle through changes to election laws and rules across the country, Democrats in Congress have steadily escalated their concerns about the potential for disenfranchisement.

At a public forum Wednesday held by Democratic lawmakers focused on elections and voter suppression, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., ranking member on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, issued a blunt charge at the White House and its Republican allies.

“Their goal is to amplify their false narrative of insecure elections to justify their power grabs and to make it harder to register to vote, to stay on the polls and to actually cast your ballot,” Padilla said.

Padilla was one of several Democrats and witnesses who accused Republicans — who did not participate in the forum — of inflating concerns about noncitizen voting to justify legal and legislative challenges to swaths of votes, sometimes based on minor paperwork errors that took place decades ago.

One of the Democrats’ key witnesses was Allison Riggs, the Democratic North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice who had her narrow, 734-vote victory last year challenged in court by her Republican opponent Jefferson Griffin.

Griffin and state GOP officials ultimately challenged 65,000 votes in four counties as illegal, including those belonging to people who didn’t have driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers on file and overseas voters. The challenge involved only voters in four Democratic-leaning counties, and only for Riggs’ race. It did not challenge those voters’ choices for the U.S. presidential and North Carolina gubernatorial elections.

A winding court battle saw Riggs spend more than $2 million in court costs to prove that her tabulated lead — which survived two recounts — was legitimate. While a federal court eventually intervened to declare Riggs the winner, she told lawmakers that “we came perilously close to watching our systems of rules-based elections crumble before our eyes” as state courts initially validated Griffin’s argument.

“Our state appellate courts were willing to give credence to the argument that the rules of an election could be changed after the election, to change the election outcome,” Riggs said.

She said she sees the legal battle over voter eligibility in her race as a blueprint for how similar challenges could be made in future elections.

“The precedent in my case is at the district level,” Riggs said. “We were prepared for it to go all the way [to the Supreme Court.] I think it is still likely [to happen again] absent our collective willingness to recognize this threat and take the appropriate steps.”

Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, which runs one of the largest voter outreach programs for military veterans and families, said many of the North Carolina voters who had their ballots flagged as suspicious in lawsuits from Griffin’s campaign and the Trump Department of Justice were members of the military serving overseas who followed state laws.

Riggs noted that her own parents were among the group of voters who had their eligibility questioned in Griffin’s legal challenge, emphasizing that her father initially registered decades ago using his military ID and has shown a valid ID during every election he’s voted in.

“President Trump has publicly attacked these ballots and pushed conspiracy theories about them,” Goldbeck said, in addition to disparaging those who registered through laws like the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act as taking advantage of a “voting loophole.” 

She also said current legislation being considered by Congress, like the SAVE Act, would require military voters and their families to register to vote in person using a passport, something that would be impossible for many people deployed overseas. 

Some observers have worried the Trump administration and GOP may be seeking to redefine how certain classes of voters and ballots are considered and handled by states and courts, chiefly by shifting the burden of proof away from the government and onto individual voters when it comes to validating citizenship.

The Trump administration and Republicans have justified such changes as necessary to ensure American elections aren’t tainted by noncitizen voting. Experts and post-election audits largely refute those charges, but GOP boosters have argued that even one noncitizen voting in a U.S. election is too many. 

In particular, they’ve pointed to the administration’s changes to the Systemic Aliens Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database managed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those changes include allowing states to search using Social Security numbers and to conduct “bulk” queries that can be matched against various state and federal databases.

Just how USCIS and state election officials use this information when identifying voters for potential removal from state voter rolls remains to be seen — and experts say the amount of time and assistance states provide to help voters cure any paperwork problems will be critical. A brief by the Fair Elections Center this week questioned the accuracy of using Social Security numbers to validate citizenship information of voters, noting the Social Security Administration didn’t even start requiring such information for applicants until 1972.

According to VoteBeat, David Jennings, the technology and policy lead for SAVE at USCIS, reportedly told state officials at an Oklahoma conference that the agency doesn’t share SAVE data with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or other agencies. He described SAVE as a “tool” for states to use when making decisions around a voter’s registration status, not the sole criteria.

The administration is also suing states, sending them information requests and working with cooperative ones to build a massive query system across state data streams that experts say is likely to sweep in far more eligible voters and ballots than noncitizens registered to vote.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, described these data requests as “either illegal or [an] attempt to effectuate illegal acts” that violate the U.S. Privacy Act of 1972, which prohibits federal agencies from collecting and sharing large amounts of personal information on Americans.

Meanwhile, policy blueprints like Project 2025 propose “in plain view, a monstrous abuse of DOJ authority, pursuing faceless persecutions of elections officials” that mirrors the White House’s ongoing efforts to impose its will on state and local election rules, Levitt said.While most judges are pushing back, and election officials are largely standing firm in most states, Levitt worries that they will have to carry out their duties securing U.S. elections “despite, not alongside, our federal government.”

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