Supreme Court deals Trump a win less than 40 days from midterm elections

President Trump delivering a prime-time address to the nation on election integrity in July.

The Supreme Court on Friday dealt President Trump a win in his election integrity push, issuing a ruling that will allow the Trump administration to go ahead with a plan to use a federal voter database ahead of the midterms elections.

The nation's top court overruled a federal judge in Washington who had blocked the federal voter SAVE citizenship verification database -- meant to weed out non-citizens who may be on voter rolls, and verify legal voters -- before the coming elections. The database includes Social Security information state officials can use to identify noncitizens on their voter lists. The court was divided 6-3 on the ruling with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Under the ruling, the Department of Homeland Security will now have authority to use the database ahead of the midterms, but the reach of the database will be limited by the National Voter Registration Act, a separate federal law, which prohibits states from purging voters within 90 days of the election, according to ABC News. The midterm elections are November 3, less than 40 days from Friday's ruling.

Nonetheless, the ruling is a small victory for Trump who has made election integrity a top priority for his administration. In July, Trump delivered a prime-time address to the nation on voter fraud, saying the Department of Homeland Security had uncovered evidence showing 278,000 non-citizens have managed to register to vote. He said that since some states don't share voter roll data with the federal government, the true number is likely higher.

Within days of the speech, which several broadcast TV networks boycotted, New Jersey's governor admitted that hundreds of noncitizens had voted in elections in the Garden State from 2023 to 2024, and thousands more non-citizens were registered to vote. She blamed the illegal voting on a "software error."

The court has not always sided with Trump on election integrity issues. Earlier this month the justices upheld a ruling by a federal judge in Boston who blocked the administration's efforts to place tougher restrictions on mail-in ballots. Trump blasted the top court after the ruling, saying, “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.” As of Friday afternoon, the president had not weighed in on the court's database ruling.