A foreign-born federal judge in D.C. ruled Monday that Americans are not allowed to check the citizenship of prospective voters because doing so might “purge voter rolls.”
D.C. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, blocked the Trump administration from using an updated database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system in order to ensure that only American citizens vote in American elections.
Sooknanan became a U.S. citizen in 2009, but seemingly still retains citizenship in Trinidad and Tobago, which she said she would only renounce “if required by law.” As Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., pointed out, “If judges can stop Presidents, they should not also be citizens of foreign nations.”
The judge argued that because the database can sometimes have outdated information — for example, if someone obtained citizenship more recently than the last available information — the whole enterprise of making sure noncitizens cannot vote in American elections should be thrown out.
“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,” Sooknanan wrote. “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.”
However, as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller sarcastically said, “Judge Sparkle decrees that America belongs to any random alien on planet earth, just like our founders intended.” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) General Counsel James Percival also noted, “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.”