"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," Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan wrote.
Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan's decision and its direct orders
On Monday, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the District Court of Washington D.C. issued a final ruling that the Trump administration’s national voter database — the modified SAVE system — violates multiple federal laws and must be dismantled. The court set aside and vacated the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices, finding them "contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law."
Which statutes the court found violated
Sooknanan concluded the modified SAVE system breached the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The opinion found that the SAVE database violated a prohibition in the Social Security Act against disclosure of Social Security numbers and other SSA records, and that it ran afoul of the Privacy Act’s substantive and procedural protections that restrict non-consensual disclosure of certain agency-held information and require proper notice and comment. The court also ruled that SAVE violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop regulations and make official decisions to ensure fairness and impartiality.
How the SAVE system was put together, according to the court
The ruling says records reviewed by the court show federal agencies knew the SAVE voter database violated federal laws but were "scrambling" to comply with President Trump’s executive order to create a system for mass voter verification. That pressure, the court wrote, resulted in agencies "haphazardly" combining and repurposing the personal information of millions of Americans from different government databases — including citizenship data that the government knew was unreliable.
The opinion emphasizes that SAVE was originally a database meant to process government benefits for legal immigrants, but last year the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took SAVE and combined it with data from the Social Security Administration and other agencies to create a new, massive database of American voters and their citizenship status.
Plaintiffs, harms the court relied on, and earlier posture
The lawsuit was filed last year by the League of Women Voters, its local affiliate groups, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). In an earlier stage of the case, Sooknanan had declined to rule the database illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act because the plaintiffs had not demonstrated irreparable harm. In her final ruling she changed course, noting that states have run their voter rolls through the modified SAVE system and that some voters were wrongfully identified as non-citizens and had their voter registrations canceled — harms the court deemed sufficient to alter its earlier view.
How states, affected voters, and privacy advocates are positioned now
- States and election officials: The court’s finding rests in part on the fact that states had already run voter rolls through the modified SAVE system; those results produced at least some cancellations of registrations after citizens were flagged as non-citizens. The decision requires the federal system that produced those results to be dismantled.
- Voters flagged as non-citizens: The ruling cites wrongful identification and canceled registrations as concrete harms. Those individuals were central to the court’s change from an earlier ruling that declined to find irreparable harm.
- Privacy advocates and civil-rights groups: EPIC celebrated the decision. John Davisson, deputy director of enforcement at EPIC, said the ruling "underscores that government agencies must follow the law, defend privacy and remain accountable to the public they serve" and called the decision "a victory for us all" for halting what he described as the illegal consolidation of sensitive personal data and defending the "bedrock of our democracy: the right to vote."
The court’s opinion also echoed concerns raised over the past year by former government officials and privacy experts, who have argued that Congress enacted privacy statutes precisely to prevent the executive branch from repurposing Americans’ data without statutory authorization. Sooknanan’s ruling frames the modified SAVE system as a departure from those legal guardrails: an executive-driven consolidation of agency data, created under pressure to implement an executive order, that the court found unlawful in its process and in substance.
The judgment orders dismantling of the 2025 SAVE modified system and vacates the related notices — a concrete, legally enforceable rebuke of the federal effort to repurpose SAVE for voter verification. The ruling leaves open further questions about what remediation will look like for voters whose registrations were canceled, how agencies will unwind any data sharing conducted under the modified system, and what administrative steps will follow now that the court has declared the practice unlawful.
