The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to let Homeland Security use a searchable citizenship database built from Social Security data to check voters before the midterms.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that burdening even a few lawful voters outweighs the “nonexistent harm” of stopping the government from doing what it likely has no authority to do. A judge had blocked the database for disclosing Americans’ private data without consent.
In January, The New York Times reported that 70 Missouri county clerks, Republicans and Democrats, had warned legislators the database kept flagging people they knew were citizens. In St. Louis County, more than a third of the flagged voters had registered the day they became citizens.
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