Trump's Big Brother scheme just got blocked —but the real danger is what comes next
A president, by Constitutional design, has no legal authority or direct role in administering, altering, or conducting elections. Authority over the mechanics of elections is legally split between state governments and Congress, leaving no constitutional role for the executive branch.
That did not stop Trump from commandeering the US Post Office with instructions to deliver mail ballots only to people on Trump-approved, Trump-purged voter lists. Trump’s “ENSURING CITIZENSHIP VERIFICATION AND INTEGRITY IN FEDERAL ELECTIONS” Executive Order, issued March 31, 2026, is his bold scheme to wrest election control from the states, which are Constitutionally vested with that authority, to transfer it to the federal government, which is not. On May 29,an eagerly compliant United States Postal Service issued proposed rules to effectuate Trump’s EO. On June 25, a federal judge ruled that “no federal law permits (Trump) to control mail-in voting through U.S.P.S.”
Trump’s fear of the midterms and the accountability they threaten is palpable. Alongside his unprecedented post office ploy, he has ordered FBI raids and DOJ investigations of democratic voter outreach organizations, as he teases the deployment of armed federal agents to polling places. Sending armed troops to intimidate voters is, for obvious reasons, forbidden by federal law, and has not been done by any US president since the Civil War era.
Trump is complementing these nefarious efforts with an all-out appropriation of state voter rolls, from which he has extracted data to build a master federal data base which has also been ruled illegal.
A federal judge blocks Trump’s Orwellian database
Threatening to cut funding to states that refuse to turn over their rolls, he has already sent federal agents to seize voter records in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. It’s plain extortion: To avoid losing federal resources they have already paid into, states must agree to run their voter rolls through the administration’s SAVE database (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, not to be confused with Trump’s SAVE America Act), to verify citizenship. The SAVE database has been expanded, widely tested, and determined to be deeply flawed. In St. Louis County alone, for example, roughly 35% of the people labeled noncitizens were citizens who registered to vote at naturalization ceremonies.
Trump has been using states’ voter roll data to build an illegal, nationwide database of Americans’ private information including home addresses, social security numbers, and other confidential “data-mined” information extracted by Palantir Technologies, a data mining and analytics firm co-founded by JD Vance promoter Peter Thiel. On Monday, a federal judge put a stop to it.
In League of Women Voters v. DHS, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the federal government “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote” by utilizing an unauthorized voter-screening database. The court found the administration’s actions presented “major violations” of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
A closer look
In her landmark 75-page ruling, Judge Sooknanan excoriated the Trump administration for ignoring federal privacy laws as it overhauled and expanded the SAVE system into what she characterized as a “faulty citizenship checker.” The worst of her criticism was reserved for how recklessly the administration handled Americans’ personal data to expand the program. She wrote that “agencies were scrambling to comply with (Trump’s March 31) Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” and that in doing so, they “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
She found that the system specifically violated the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers. The judge sharply condemned real-world consequences, noting that (Republican) states had “partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
She pointed to concrete examples from Texas where naturalized citizens were wrongly flagged and had their registrations canceled or placed under review, but citizens in Texas are not alone. The SAVE system merged Social Security data with immigration files extracted across multiple state and federal platforms, resulting in widespread data flaws and false positive matches. System studies revealed faulty data matching, outdated records, and user compliance failures resulting in high rates of false positives. These flaws are systemic, flagging citizens as non-citizens across dozens of counties in multiple states.
Big brother by any other name
In June of last year, NPR first reported on the federal government’s massive expansion of SAVE into a Big Brother tool; they also reported that DHS, in partnership with DOGE, had not followed public notice protocols required under the Privacy Act before it expanded the system. Such data integration, resulting in a federally sanctioned, nationwide master list, has never before existed.
A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been opposed by privacy advocates. Although political conservatives traditionally oppose mass data consolidation by the federal government, they set aside such objections for Trump. Conservative legislators strongly supported Trump’s expansion of the SAVE program as a tool to prevent non-citizens from voting after Trump and Fox Newsfalsely convinced them that fraudulent voting was widespread. It wasn’t, and never has been.
Judge Sooknanan rejected the Justice Department’s argument that only a small number of voters might be affected, calling it a “red herring.” She reiterated that the APA mandates that a “reviewing court shall. . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action” that is in excess of statutory authority, contrary to law, unconstitutional, arbitrary and capricious, or procedurally defective. Trump’s unauthorized expansion of the SAVE program was all of those things, leading the judge to set aside and nullify the entire system.
Her ruling concluded with a pointed moral declaration: since the federal government is using an unauthorized, faulty-by-design federal database to attack the sacred right to vote, courts should decline to ‘stand idly by’ while that happens.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.
