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WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Friday upheld President Trump’s expanded use of government data to spot non-citizens who are registered to vote.

The justices granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside a judge’s order that blocked use of this data on the grounds it was error-prone, particularly for naturalized citizens.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.

The decision will aid states that seek to scrub their voter rolls and remove those who are not citizens.

Several Republican-led states including Texas and Florida supported the administration’s appeal.

The use of the new database “allowed Texas to more efficiently, promptly, and economically ensure the accuracy of its voter rolls,” the state said. It was “able to run its entire list of 18 million voters” through the expanded system of checks “in bulk and for no cost.”

It’s not clear the decision will have much impact in California and other Democratic-led states. It is likely to have a limited impact in the month ahead because the law forbids states from purging their voter rolls in the 90 days prior to an election.

The court, in an unsigned opinion, said the law supported use of the data.

“The federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” the court said. “The order below prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

The administration said the Department of Homeland Security can respond to more than 1 million requests per day to check if a person appears to be a citizen or not based on Social Security records and other data files.

If not, state or county election officials may require these suspect voters to furnish proof of their citizenship.

However, states and local election boards are not required to conduct these searches. The administration also said its data reports are not final proof of citizenship.

Upholding these data searches “would not require states, candidates, parties, or voters to do anything,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer told the court. “It would simply make available to states additional information. … States that wish to use that information in the course of ensuring that only eligible citizens cast ballots this November should be free to do so.”

In dissent, Jackson said the court’s order creates the “risk that states might cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or force such persons to provide proof of citizenship before voting.”

The new system of voter checks is based on the 40-year-old Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, that was created by Congress. Then, the goal was to check if applicants were entitled to receive federal benefits.

Last year, Trump issued an executive order directing Homeland Security to expand the reach of SAVE to provide states “access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered to vote.”

It is a federal crime for non-citizens to register and vote.

Trump has long maintained that non-citizens are voting, but he has had little evidence to support that claim.

Voting rights advocates sued, contending the new “mass verification” system was not authorized by Congress and relied on data that is protected as private under the law.

In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, agreed and blocked use of the expanded searches. The administration has “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she said.

On Sept. 4, the U.S. court of appeals by a 2-1 vote refused to overturn her ruling, prompting the administration’s fast-track appeal.

The voting rights advocates, led by the League of Women Voters, had urged the court to stand aside.

“The government has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” they said.

The data searches are flawed, they argued, because they “only reflect a person’s citizenship status when they applied for a Social Security number. That status does not automatically update if the person later naturalizes.”

Texas admitted that the mass checks yield “some inaccurate information.” It said 2,724 people were cited as “potential non-citizens” among its 18 million registered voters.

In response, county officials had to check further to confirm the citizenship of these voters, the state said.

Last week, the Supreme Court dealt Trump a defeat when it blocked use of his proposed postal rules that could have prevented millions of voters from casting ballots by mail.

In a brief order, the court said Trump’s claims of power over states and their voting were “unlikely to succeed.”

But in the case of the expanded data files, the court said the law appears to favor the administration.

Hollywood A-listers are more comfortable than ever with cloning their voice and likeness to create a new stream of income, despite the threat of viewer backlash to artificial intelligence.

Sunny Hostin of the popular daily talk show “The View” has licensed her image and likeness to AI production studio Fountain 0, which will make film adaptations of her novels.

“To be able to bring my novels to life in movie and TV form, and actually have my image inserted in the productions, so that audiences can relate to me through my stories beyond my role as an author, is incredibly exciting to me,” Hostin said in a statement.

“AI can give me a way to both more fully develop, and more fully immerse myself in, IP I have developed,” she said.

The Overton window for acceptable AI use in Hollywood continues to widen as Hollywood actors, television hosts, and influencers embrace cloning with protections and compensation. As high-quality synthetic re-creations become cheap and accessible, cloning has become a more desirable option for studios struggling with runaway production costs.

Audiences will be subject to more AI content on the big screen that’s indistinguishable from real human performances.

Fountain 0 is the producer behind “Dreams of Violets,” a fully AI-generated film inspired by anti-government protests in Tehran. The 75-minute drama was made with a budget of $2,000 without a cast or a crew, and was the first fully AI-generated film accepted at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“We are incredibly gratified that Sunny is willing to be the talent pioneer willing to step out and take advantage of this new form of creative expression,” said Ash Koosha, co-founder and CEO of Fountain 0, in a release.

The production company will be releasing its second fully AI-generated film, “Odysseus: The Fall,” later this year. The film uses the likeness of many people, including the film’s creator Koosha, who stars as Odysseus.

Fountain 0’s executive chariman told CNBC that the film is designed to ride the buzz around Christopher Nolan’s ‘’The Odyssey” and give people the opportunity to compare the height of human filmmaking with AI filmmaking.

Proponents of AI argue that it allows writers and creators to take on blockbuster-scale films without financial constraints. Many creators oppose AI because it could replace humans and was built using the unauthorized scraping of creative works used to train generative AI video and image models.

Online reactions to news of Hostin’s cloning were fierce.

“Basically, no film studio wants to give her the budget to turn her books into a movie with real actors, so she’s resorting to AI studios,” wrote one person on Reddit.

Hollywood has fought hard for protections from AI in the prolonged writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing about 160,000 actors and other performers, has been demanding informed consent, fair compensation, more control and transparency over the use of digital replicas.

The latest agreement, signed in June, introduced limits on studios’ use of digital replicas. The contract requires studios to notify actors before using their voices to create a replica. After a project is complete, actors must sign off and be paid the equivalent of an in-person performance if their replica is used.

Additionally, studios need to pay residuals to digital replicas used in reruns, and replicas cannot be used during a strike.

Hiring fully AI-generated characters such as Tilly Norwood, created without hiring a human performer, is not impossible but comes with a very high threshold for use under the 2026 union contract. Producers must notify the union in advance and prove the AI character brings “significant additional value” to the role.

Still, a fissure remains between those actors who stay morally opposed to cloning, and those who embrace this new reality.

ElevenLabs’ voice marketplace features clones of dozens of personalities — including actress Judy Garland, physicist Richard Feynman and popular characters such as Mr. Potato Head for creators to legally license and get compensated for their use.

This has created a contentious ecosystem in which A-listers are gaining millions from cloning with safeguards and building a new stream of passive income from their intellectual property, while early-career actors complain that their likenesses are being misappropriated and opportunities are being driven away. A massive lobbying effort is underway to institute a uniform standard for protecting an individual’s voice and likeness as property rights.

California lawmakers have passed legislation that will make it easier for government agencies to protect themselves from the rising use of artificial intelligence for public comment, records requests and other forms of civic engagement.

Senate Bill 1159 from Sen. Christopher Cabaldon (D-West Sacramento) prohibits anyone from knowingly using AI to falsely represent that a real person engaged with a government agency. It also specifies that agencies are not required to treat engagement from AI or bots as if they were real humans.

“What we have seen with the result of the advent of artificial intelligence and other similar technologies is the capability for these systems to flood the zone — to drown local governments, and potentially state agencies as well, in inauthentic, non-human engagement” Cabaldon said during a March meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The legislation was introduced shortly after a February report from The Times about a campaign to sway a vote on gas-powered appliances at the South Coast Air Quality Management District. A Southern California based public affairs consultant named Matt Klink took credit for the campaign, stating that he used a platform called CiviClick to flood the district with 20,000 public comments opposing the rule ahead of the air board’s vote.

CiviClick describes itself on its website as “the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform.” Company officials maintain that AI was not used in the AQMD campaign, but said it is a tool they offer and use in other campaigns. Chief executive Chazz Clevinger said he could not share how the 20,000 comments to the air board were generated or how constituents were identified and contacted.

Agency insiders said the onslaught of emails almost certainly influenced the air board’s decision to reject the proposed rules, which would have imposed fees on new gas-powered furnaces and water heaters for some 10 million appliances across the South Coast region.

Cabaldon cited The Times story when he introduced the legislation, noting that at least three people contacted by the air district said they had not submitted the public comments attached to their names.

He also cited a report from the San Francisco Chronicle about a similar campaign to sway a different rule at the Bay Area Management District, which was run through a platform called Speak4 that advertises its ability to produce custom AI-powered letters.

The business advocacy group that ran the campaign also denied that AI was used. However, 10 people contacted by The Chronicle said they had not written the letters attributed to them. “This was forged,” one person said.

Reached by phone, Cabaldon said the legislation will help public agencies navigate how to respond to the deployment of AI, which is increasingly being used in a way that “swamps our civic engagement process, but also disables our state and local governments altogether.”

For example, the California Public Records Act requires government agencies to respond to requests for public records within 10 days, while the Brown Act and the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act guarantee the right to participate in public meetings and provide public comment.

“The point of the bill is to say that these laws are about humans, and just because it comes in the form that a human would write it, does not mean you have to treat each of these communications as if it’s a human being, and therefore, AI is not entitled to 10 days, AI is not entitled to three minutes at the school board meeting,” he said.

Experts said the use of AI for “astroturfing,” or faking, civic engagement is a growing trend. In the United Kingdom, a service called Objector.ai is using AI to identify and generate formal objections to local planning applications, garnering the concern of experts, The Guardian reported.

Public officials in California are worried, too. Vacaville vice mayor Michael Silva said the city has been receiving AI-generated public records requests, which are slowing its ability to respond to other legitimate requests submitted by residents.

Dylan Plummer, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Heat Campaign, said many AI campaigns have benefited the fossil fuel industry and pose an “existential threat to public participation in our democracy.”

“The passage of Senate Bill 1159 is an important step to clarify the law and discourage the use of emerging technologies to falsify public records and mislead regulators in California,” he said. “That said, much work still needs to be done to understand how widespread this practice is, and to hold bad actors accountable for laws that may have already been broken.”

Lawmakers acknowledged that the legislation is just a start, and that it is increasingly difficult for public officials to detect bespoke letters, deepfake videos or other kinds of engagement powered by AI. The bill authorizes government agencies to use disclosure verification tools to determine if AI is present — something the Bay Area Air District already indicated it may do by replacing its email system with a website for public comment submissions instead.

The legislation does not preclude real people from using AI to facilitate genuine public engagement, such as someone using ChatGPT or Perplexity to improve the text of a letter, so long as the volume and frequency of their engagement are consistent with ordinary participation from a real person.

For its part, CiviClick notes on its website that it supports SB 1159, and said its platform already complies with what the bill proposes.

Some lawmakers said the use of AI in a civic capacity represents a new frontier.

“If I’d have read this bill back when I was on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, I would have wondered what you were smoking,” Sen. Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks) said during the March meeting of the Judiciary Committee.

“But that’s how things have progressed, and the development of technology will always outpace the development of defenses against the undesirable effects of technology,” he said.

SB 1159 passed the legislature this month and will head to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for signature in September.

SACRAMENTO — The California legislature passed a bill Wednesday that would require the state to track the use of pesticides that contain perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS chemicals, which can be harmful to humans.

The bill, by Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank), heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who can sign it into law or veto it.

Schultz’s original bill would have phased out pesticides with PFAs and put California in line with Maine and Minnesota, which passed laws restricting their use.

The state’s powerful agricultural industry objected to the proposed ban. Nearly half of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts come from California, according to the state.

The revised bill instead requires the Department of Pesticide Regulation to flag which pesticides have PFAs in its public state database.

The vast majority of PFAS chemicals have not been tested for human health effects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Studies show that exposure to certain levels of PFAs may lead to decreased fertility and developmental delays in children and increase the risk of cancers.

State regulators and environmental groups disagree on the definition of the chemicals, making it difficult to find a consensus on regulations.

The European Union has prohibited 23 of the PFAS pesticides in use in California, including bifenthrin, trifluralin and flufenacet, according to Environmental Working Group, a sponsor of Schultz’s bill.

Schultz expressed disappointment after his bill was changed this summer but said Thursday that the remaining regulations are “a vital step toward ensuring California’s agricultural legacy is defined by health and innovation, not by the accumulation of toxic PFAS in our soil and water.”

“We need to help our farmers transition away from these persistent chemicals so that California can be a global leader in food safety,” he added.