The Trump administration attempted to rig the midterm elections with schemes that go far beyond gerrymandering.
At the heart of all of the president’s plans are various illegal executive orders he has signed, all related to voting.
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One of these executive orders required the Social Security Administration to provide personal information so that a database could be created to purge voters.
The scheme was clearly illegal, and U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the database:
This case challenges two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government excesses: the right to privacy and the right to vote. Over the past year, several federal agencies have joined forces to create a centralized federal database containing the private information of U.S. citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status and other sensitive data. But several decades ago, Congress put in place protections to prevent precisely this type of centralized data storage. And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violated these statutory protections.
The agencies were scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which ordered them to create a system of mass voter verification. So they randomly combined and reused the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data they knew was unreliable.
Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing U.S. citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. Overall, the federal government has knowingly violated the privacy rights of American citizens in ways that threaten the sacred right to vote. The Court cannot stand idly by while this happens.
The decision is being hailed as a major victory for privacy and voting rights.