Two months out from midterms, the Trump DOJ is asking the Supreme Court to unfreeze a citizenship-check system a federal judge already called a mess — because nothing says “election integrity” like bulk Social Security scrapes and wrongful purge risk. Reuters, 8 September 2026.
Lawyers called Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s June block “indefensible,” moaning it strips their power to feed states citizenship hits from a revamped DHS SAVE database. The primary filing (DHS v. League of Women Voters, 8 Sep 2026) admits the May 2025 upgrade added SSNs + bulk search; the D.C. Circuit shrugged off a stay on 4 September, so now it’s SCOTUS cosplay.
Sooknanan’s court found the rebuild haphazard with unreliable citizenship data. Rights groups say eligible voters — often naturalized citizens — get wrongly tagged as noncitizens and bounced off the rolls. Democracy Forward’s Skye Perryman: courts keep rejecting an “unlawful system” that torches privacy and the franchise. Bonus ask in the same Reuters piece: revive a blocked Postal Service mail-ballot rule. Pattern recognition not required, but it helps.