Should the government be allowed to verify that voters are actually citizens?
You'd think that's an easy yes. Apparently not everyone agrees.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, dropped a 75-page ruling blocking the Trump administration from using an upgraded federal immigration database to check voter rolls for noncitizens.
BREAKING: Biden-appointed judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, just BLOCKED the Trump admin from using a social security database system to verify voter eligibility.
We have foreign judges telling us we can’t secure our elections
What are we even doing? pic.twitter.com/qdyj98Dlvp
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 22, 2026
The database is called SAVE – Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – and it's been around since 1986.
The Trump administration upgraded it last year. At least 67 million voter registrations got scanned through the new system. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls starting in April 2025.
That's half the country, trying to make sure only citizens are voting.
So What Did the Judge Actually Rule?
She ruled that the upgrade violated three federal laws: the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Her argument is that agencies combined citizenship data and Social Security numbers in ways Congress never authorized.
In her own words, the agencies were “scrambling to comply with an Executive Order” and “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
She also found that some real U.S. citizens got flagged as noncitizens and lost their registrations. In Texas, some flagged voters turned out to be citizens after all. Others had their registrations canceled, though no specific number has been released.
To Be Fair…
There are legitimate concerns here. A database that flags naturalized citizens as noncitizens is a real problem.
Nobody wants eligible voters knocked off the rolls by a glitch.
But banning the tool isn't the answer. Fixing it is.
DHS General Counsel James Percival didn't beat around the bush: “It's amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.”
You can't spend years insisting noncitizen voting isn't happening while fighting every effort to actually check.
Nevada's Got Skin in This Game
Nevada runs some of the tightest races in the country. Margins of a few hundred votes decide elections all the time.
Races that tight don't have room for sloppy data.
The DOJ has now sued 30 states and Washington D.C. for access to voter registration records. They're 0 for 9 in those lawsuits.
Courts keep slamming the door on what most voters consider basic common sense.
Courts Keep Saying No. The Question Is Why.
A federal judge blocked Trump's executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
If the data was bad, fine – we fix the data. But that's not what's happening here.
What's happening is that every tool for checking gets shut down.
If noncitizen voting isn't happening, why does proving it scare them so much?
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Nevada News & Views. Digital technology was used in the research, writing, and production of this article. Please verify information and consult additional sources as needed.
