EPIC: Administration’s Plan to Unlawfully Aggregate Personal Data to Enable Voter Purges Ended by Court Order in Significant Voting Issues Victory. A Trump-Vance administration attempt to unlawfully meddle in elections was struck down today, as a federal judge ordered the administration to end and disentangle a massive government database that consolidates millions of Americans’ sensitive and legally protected personal information, leaving them vulnerable to baseless investigations and being unlawfully purged from voter rolls. The ruling comes in League of Women Voters v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a case brought by the League of Women Voters, League of Women Voters of Virginia, League of Women Voters of Louisiana, League of Women Voters of Texas, and EPIC. The coalition is represented in the matter by Democracy Forward Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Fair Elections Center. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” reads today’s decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” Read today’s decision here and order here, and read more about this case here.
League of Women Voters v. Department of Homeland Security – LWV, LWVLA, LWVVA, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and five individuals sued the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Justice to protect Americans’ sensitive information from being used in violation of the Privacy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the US Constitution. In 1974, Congress passed the Privacy Act to prevent the government from creating national data banks or a “centralized Federal information system” that would consolidate sensitive data of Americans stored at various agencies. In 1988, Congress amended the Privacy Act to prohibit “computer matching programs” that compare data across agencies unless agencies disclose it to the public and Congress. Since then, these laws have protected against data pooling across federal agencies. This has prevented the government from building a tool for surveilling and investigating Americans without checks. However, in the first months of the second Trump Administration, multiple agencies began creating comprehensive databases of American citizens’ personal data, centralized at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). With the help of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the federal agencies’ goal is to create a linked system of databases that allows centralized investigations and analyses of millions of Americans’ sensitive personal information. The consolidation includes transforming the US Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) tool into a national citizenship data system that draws citizenship data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and allows expanded searches. SSA has admitted its citizenship data for naturalized citizens and US citizens born before 1981 is incomplete and unreliable. For example, an immigrant who is not yet a citizen can get their own SSN, but SSA marks that they are not yet a citizen. However, once they become naturalized as a citizen, SSA does not consistently automatically update their data in their own system. Because of this bad data, citizens who are legally registered voters could be purged from the voter rolls.
