People who rightly fear a last-minute Trump administration bid to skew the 2026 midterms may have had a moment of panic after seeing Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court order. One of these threats has been Trump’s efforts toward some kind of wild voter-roll purge of nonexistent noncitizens, and the Court sided with Trump’s lawyers on a procedural issue related to this matter.
Don’t panic, yet.
The unsigned opinion about the case, Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters, was apparently backed by all six members of the Court’s conservative bloc. It quashed a lower-court order preventing the administration from accessing potentially sensitive personal data as part of its maintenance of a dubious DHS database for citizenship verification, which is used for state and local governments’ inquiries about voter qualifications. Aside from the fact that this was a temporary procedural win for the administration, both the majority and the three dissenting liberal justices (in an opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson) agreed that federal law prohibits wholesale voter-roll purges within 90 days of a federal election. So this order should have limited if any impact on the mid...