Defending Privacy Has Been Essential to the Fight to Ensure the Right to Vote This Year 

While voters across the nation cast their votes at the ballot box today, EPIC has spent the past year fighting to protect that right to vote. In every election cycle there are important legal battles that define and shape the electoral landscape—disputes over redistricting and ballot access and the timing and method of voting—but this year some of the most important election cases have been about privacy. That might seem surprising, but privacy has been a fundamental part of the right to vote for more than a century. This year is different. We have seen an unprecedented attack by the Federal Government on voter privacy and the right to vote. And EPIC has joined forces with voting rights organizations to fight back and defend our data and our democracy. 

Under the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been tasked with creating massive new databases stocked with sensitive information about voters across the country and using secret and unvetted systems to search for supposed election fraud through non-citizen voting. The plan is illegal and unwise on many levels. As EPIC has called attention to in circuit after circuit, the DOJ’s baseless demands for unredacted voter rolls from states to populate these databases fail federal data security and transparency standards.   But the more basic problem with the plan is that their systems are not actually good at identifying citizens and non-citizens across the country. And it is simply not the role of the Federal Government, let alone the Department of Homeland Security, to tell states how to run their elections as courts have recognized in case after case. 

Privacy has been essential to defending against these attacks on our democracy, which is why EPIC has joined forces with litigators at Democracy Forward and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Protect Democracy, and with public interest organizations including the League of Women Voters and the League of United Latin American Citizens, to challenge these data abuses. The focal point of the legal challenges that EPIC has pursued this year is a law that has been central to our work for more than three decades—the Privacy Act of 1974. Congress enshrined in that law a core set of principles that have defined privacy law globally for more than half a century: 

• There should be no secret government data systems 

• People have a right to know who has their data and how it is being used 

• People have a right to limit the use of their data for purposes they do not consent to 

• People have a right to correct or amend their records 

• An entity maintaining and using personal data must ensure that it is accurate, secure, and protected against misuse 

The Trump Administration’s campaign to create secret “citizenship list” databases and weaponize them to disenfranchise voters violates every single one of these principles.  

That is why EPIC sued along with the League of Women Voters to challenge the Department of Homeland Security’s proposal to expand a database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) and turn that (formerly) limited system into an illegal and unreliable national citizenship database. The overhaul of SAVE has already exposed the sensitive data of millions of Americans to a risk of improper disclosure, sown chaos into states’ maintenance of voter rolls, and led to naturalized and derived citizens being illegally removed from the voter rolls.  

Judge Sooknanan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia recognized these harms and the unlawful nature of DHS’s proposal when she ruled in EPIC’s favor on June 22, 2026, granting our motion for summary judgment and vacating the agency’s proposal to expand the SAVE system. As a result of that order, the DHS had to disable the new SAVE system functions including bulk data uploads and searches by Social Security number. The Government moved to challenge that ruling with an appeal to the DC Circuit, but also agreed to a settlement with the State of Florida in a separate case that, purportedly, required the agency to activate the SAVE features that Judge Sooknanan’s order had prohibited.  

The Government sought an emergency order from the DC Circuit staying Judge Sooknanan’s decision. But the federal appeals court rejected DHS’s request and found that the modified SAVE system would violate the Social Security Act and likely impose “adverse consequences to citizens from using inaccurate SSA citizenship information in SAVE, including the risk—already borne out in Texas—that citizens maybe required to prove citizenship to remain registered and, in some cases, may have their [voter] registrations cancelled.” After that loss, the Government sought emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued a per curiam decision granting the temporary stay of the district court order over the dissent signed by Justices Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan. 

The Supreme Court’s stay decision in EPIC’s case recognized that the “plaintiff organizations likely have standing” and recognized EPIC’s arguments that the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act would prohibit the modifications to SAVE. But the Court posited that a separate law, called the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, had “authorized DHS to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigrant status from other agencies” and to respond to inquiries for such information from state officials “[n]otwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law.” The Court also, notably, recognized that the impact of its stay was limited by the restriction under the National Voter Registration Act that limits “any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” in the 90 days prior to an election. This 90-day quiet period was created to safeguard voters from being unfairly removed from voter rolls right before an election. 

This last point is key to understanding how this case, and other challenges brought by EPIC, League of Women Voters, and others, situate in the landscape of the federal government’s broader campaign to intimidate and disenfranchise voters. As election day inched closer, the federal government continued to try to stymie the right to vote. DHS’ proposed modifications to the SAVE system were only one part of these broader efforts. Other attacks on the right to vote include the federal government’s attempt to distribute its own error-ridden and inaccurate voter lists to force states to remove voters. EPIC has challenged these efforts as well. 

In September, EPIC sued U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to block its planned “State Citizenship List” distribution and portal in the leadup to the 2026 Midterm Election. Judge Xinis in that case ordered the government to notify the court 30 days in advance of activation of the portal or dissemination of the lists after a hearing on September 25^th. And EPIC sued again with League of Women Voters and the League of United Latin American Citizens to challenge the DHS’s unlawful collection and augmentation of voter data from at least 47 states.  

Just last week, we filed for an emergency injunction to block the DHS and Department of Justice from disclosing this unlawfully obtained voter data to states and localities about individuals they claim are “likely noncitizens.” And we won. The court granted our injunction and has prohibited the Government from disclosing any “data purporting to constitute lists of individual potential or actual non-citizen voters or registered voters” to any state or local election officials.  

Meanwhile, as our first two cases were underway in the summer, the U.S. Postal Service was trying to defend a proposed Ballot Mail Rule (subsequently vacated by the federal court in Massachusetts) that would have given the federal government de facto control over when and whether ballots were delivered via a new ballot scanning system. It has been clear since earlier this year with the release of the President’s March 31 Executive Order that these interrelated efforts were aimed at usurping state control over elections and to consolidate the power to choose who could cast a vote to a few federal officials under the direction of the President. That effort is as terrifying as it is illegal, and shows how central the right to privacy has become to defending our democracy. 

The Trump Administration is continuing to try new and more desperate ways to interfere in this election. Last month the Department of Justice sued the State of California demanding that local election officials sequester 20,000 ballots that they claim were issued to individuals that the federal government believes are likely noncitizens. This case followed merely 48 hours after the DOJ had sent a demand letter to California election officials, with the supposed list delivered to Los Angeles County officials on a thumb drive with a password written on a Post-it note. Courts have rejected the DOJ’s attempt to get an injunction and the Government has pressed on seeking emergency intervention by the Supreme Court, which the Court summarily denied yesterday. 

But as precarious as this moment feels with the continued assault by federal officials against the right to vote, it would be much worse if not for the work of so many groups to shine light on and challenge this voter intimidation and disenfranchisement project all year. The case that EPIC and League of Women Voters brought ensured that the DHS could not illegally modify the SAVE database and demand states conduct sweeping and unverified voter roll purges prior to the 90-day quiet period guaranteed by the NVRA. The challenge to the USPS Mail Ballot Rule ensured that millions of voters would not be disenfranchised by making vote-by-mail impossible to administer or to allow the selective blocking of ballot returns based on secretive and untested DHS “citizenship list” data. And now, our most recent win ensures that DHS and DOJ cannot further weaponize voters’ data to decide whose vote counts.