Sept 5 (Reuters) – A federal appeals court panel rejected the Trump administration’s bid to lift a ban on using a federal immigration database to check the accuracy of citizenship records on states’ voter rolls.
In a 2-1 ruling on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declined to lift a lower court’s ban on using the Homeland Security Department’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. The earlier ruling determined that the government cannot use the system ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, in which Trump’s Republicans will be defending narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress.
Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins, both appointed to the appeals court by President Barack Obama, upheld the lower court decision that the SAVE system violates the Social Security Act as it shares millions of Americans’ private information. The appeals court judges also noted concerns around the potential for inaccurate citizen information that could lead to people having to prove citizenship to remain registered voters, and in some cases could even lead to voter registration being canceled.
U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, an appointee of President Donald Trump, dissented.
A federal judge in Florida in July ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to resume giving four Republican-led states access to the database after another judge blocked it from continuing to use the database nationwide.
(Reporting by Georgina McCartney in Houston; Editing by Sergio Non and Andrea Ricci)
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