The Trump administration has been accused of attempting to manipulate the midterm elections through tactics that extend far beyond traditional gerrymandering.
Central to these efforts are several executive orders related to voting, which have been characterized as illegal.
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One particular executive order mandated the Social Security Administration to provide personal information, facilitating the creation of a database intended to remove voters.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the database:
This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote. In the past year, several federal agencies have joined forces to create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and other sensitive data. But decades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank. And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections.
The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.
Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. 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. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.
The ruling is being celebrated as a significant triumph for privacy and voting rights.
