Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
This week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. blocked the recently-expanded use of a federal database, The Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, which contains private information and has been used by the Trump administration to remove alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls. The use of the revamped SAVE tool to purge voter rolls is just one of many ways the administration has, in the last year, attempted to exert federal control over election administration and sow seeds of doubt in states’ rights to administer elections.
District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with the The League of Women Voters, the voting rights group that challenged the recent changes to SAVE in a 2025 lawsuit. In her ruling on Monday she said that in using SAVE the way that it has, the federal government has “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
“This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens,” she added.
Let’s back up a little… because you’re probably wondering how exactly the Trump administration revamped this once-innocuous database to become a tool used to purge supposed non-citizens from state voter rolls.
SAVE was originally developed as an immigration tool, managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (an agency within DHS) to verify the citizenship and immigration status of individuals applying for certain governmental benefits.
But in 2025 — against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s increasingly blatant effort to interfere in election administration and drum up fear about elections — DOGE and DHS expanded the role of SAVE to be used to purge supposed non-citizen from the rolls, turning it into a national citizenship database by collecting personal identifying information (aka data from the Social Security Administration which is known to be unreliable) into the database.
The changes to SAVE came in response to Trump’s March 25, 2025 executive order that directed DHS and SSA to ignore privacy laws and create a database for state and local election officials to verify citizenship status for people registering to vote.
There are several issues with the way the Trump administration is trying to use the SAVE database, specifically on the privacy front. But one glaring election-related issue: there is evidence that the tool is incorrectly flagging eligible voters as ineligible. Also, as we know by now, non-citizen voting is extremely rare and it is not happening en masse as Trump and his allies claim.
In fact, the unreliability of the tool is something Sooknanan pointed to in her ruling, saying that the administration “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
In response to the changes made to follow Trump’s executive order, the League of Women voters, and a coalition of other voting rights organizations, challenged the changes to the use of the SAVE database. So, Sooknanan’s ruling this week does not get rid of the SAVE database entirely, rather, it blocks the Trump’s administration’s 2025 expansion of the tool.
There’s a lot more to unpack this week. Let’s dig in.
Trump Admin Now Withholding Funding If States Don’t Allow Its Overreach
Relatedly, the Trump administration continues to try to exert federal control over election administration, this time, per a report from CNN, by threatening to withhold tens of millions of dollars in Homeland Security funding if states refuse to adopt a series of election changes, one of those being a requirement for states to run their voter rolls through the SAVE database we discussed above.
The funding, CNN noted, is expected to amount to more than a billion dollars this fiscal year and states use it for things like preparing for disasters and preventing terrorism.
The administration claims that voter rolls must be run through the faulty database to root out supposedly rampant (in Trump’s mind) voter fraud, for which there continues to be no evidence. It’s not a coincidence, as CNN points out, that this threat comes against the backdrop of states increasingly implementing laws to protect against federal interference in elections.
Another Loss for the DOJ’s Ever-Floundering Campaign to Seize Voter Files
In some bad news for the Trump administration and its still-floundering campaign to seize sensitive voter data from the states, a federal judge on Thursday dismissed yet another DOJ lawsuit, this time in Maryland.
This most recent loss is the DOJ’s ninth loss in court to date, with zero wins for the effort thus far.
For many months now, the DOJ has been trying to access personal identifying voter data from 44 states and Washington D.C. This data — which experts have confirmed to TPM the DOJ is not entitled to — includes drivers licenses and Social Security numbers.
Very few states have complied with the demand, so, in response, the DOJ has sued 31 states, but has not yet won a single legal challenge.
As part of this campaign, the DOJ has been citing provisions in both the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA), neither of which gives the federal government the authority to demand personal identifying voter information.
“The DOJ does not have authority granted to it by Congress to seize records from the states,” David Becker, a former DOJ lawyer and the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, previously told TPM.
In her ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, affirmed, once again, that the CRA does not give the DOJ access to state voter files.
“…this Court joins every court to have addressed this issue in concluding that an SVRL is not a record or paper that a state must produce to the United States under the CRA,” she wrote.
Also on Wednesday, the DOJ had its first appeals court loss after a three-judge federal appeals court panel upheld a lower court ruling that dismissed a voter roll case in Michigan.
The Latest in Maricopa County’s Ongoing Election Dispute
A Maricopa County supervisor is speaking out against the County recorder — the latest escalation in an ongoing election dispute between the election denier-connected recorder and the board of supervisors.
As a reminder, Maricopa County’s Republican-controlled board of supervisors is accusing the office of Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap — a Republican with ties to the election denier community — of removing voting equipment and documents from the county’s main tabulation center.
Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell initiated an investigation into these allegations. Heap maintains that the equipment in question was “purchased entirely with Recorder’s Office funds in 2023 and has never been lawfully transferred to the Elections Department.”
Most recently, on Friday, Maricopa County supervisor Thomas Galvin, during an interview with KTAR News 92.3, called Heap’s action “highly problematic.”
“They went into what we call the ballot cage where ballots were being kept, but the recorder’s employees who work for Justin emerged with white envelopes,” Galvin told KTAR News. “I have no way of knowing if they were walking out with live ballots, or if there’s anything in those envelopes. However, I think it is highly problematic because only certain people have access to that space in that building.”
“All of the grifters pushing these stupid conspiracy theories about elections that never were true or panned out, now we see it on video. Your eyes are not lying to you and they’re quiet about it,” he added. “Can you imagine if the board of supervisors had done that to Justin Heap? He would have been the first guy in the street with pitchforks.”
ACLU Trains Election Volunteers in Key States
The ACLU is going to spend millions of dollars to make sure the midterm elections are properly administered and certified this fall, per reporting from NBC.
“Bolstered by the combined power of our storied legal, policy, and advocacy expertise, affiliate presence in every state, and network of millions of volunteers and supporters, the ACLU will spend $24.5 million to protect the power to vote, the resilience of our democratic institutions, and public confidence in every stage of the electoral process; and to guarantee that every vote is counted according to the law,” the organization wrote in a press release this week.
The organization is training thousands of election volunteers across the country, but prioritizing states where, in the organization’s words, “the risk of election interference and voter disenfranchisement is high.” This includes the following key battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“We are in a really unprecedented situation here with this administration’s abuses of power and concerted attempts to suppress voters, to gerrymander, to basically co-opt our democratic system,” Deidre Schifeling, the ACLU’s chief political and advocacy officer, told NBC.
“Where it is clear that the administration is undermining the legitimacy of our democratic process and trying to co-opt it or sabotage it, we will be ready to react to that in a variety of ways,” she said.
In Other Election News:
Politico: Trump says he asked US attorney for California election probe: ‘Do me a favor’
Vox: How Trump’s redistricting could backfire
Media Matters: Trump suggested that Bill Pulte at DNI may investigate “rigged elections.” Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast is thrilled.
Democracy Docket: Republicans sue Michigan to make it easier to disrupt ballot counting and challenge voters in the midterms
First, I guess.