A federal appeals court panel declined late Friday to let the Department of Homeland Security restore access to a new tool that would allow states to compare their voter rolls against federal citizenship and Social Security data.
By a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit determined that the department had not shown that the new system, built out of a database historically used to check the legal status of immigrants, could be done without violating privacy laws protecting Social Security information.
The ruling kept the system offline for now as the Trump administration has launched an all- out legal effort to put in place new restrictions on voting in time for the midterm elections in November.
Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Robert L. Wilkins, appointees of President Obama, formed the majority. Judge Gregory G. Katsas, an appointee of President Trump, wrote in a dissenting opinion that he would have lifted a lower court’s order blocking the department from making the tool available.
“The public interest does not favor interim restoration of a system the government has not made a strong showing it may lawfully operate,” the majority’s opinion said.
The ruling was temporary, and the judges on the panel said that they would reach a full decision on the underlying legal questions within 10 days.
The database at issue was created at President Trump’s direction in an executive order giving federal agencies a more direct role policing elections. In addition to the Homeland Security tool, the order also ordered the Postal Service to take steps to check the eligibility of voters casting ballots by mail.
Earlier on Friday, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the Postal Service from making those changes. But the Trump administration has continued to fight adverse rulings and push for both agencies to be allowed to implement the new processes in time for the upcoming election, now less than 60 days away.
A lower court judge had ruled in June that repurposing the modified citizenship database for use in election monitoring violated several federal laws prohibiting the disclosure of sensitive federal data.
The majority noted that the Trump administration had waited until after the case was decided to put forward novel arguments about why the Social Security data could be used in the database, which the lower court had not had an opportunity to consider.
The earlier ruling in June also drew a parallel lawsuit by Republican-led states, which sued in Florida seeking to regain access to the database to screen their voter rolls for possible noncitizens. In July, a federal judge in that case agreed, ordering that officials in Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Indiana be allowed to access the Homeland Security data once again.
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