The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to use a dramatically expanded federal database to screen voter rolls, a decision that comes less than two months before Election Day and raises concerns about eligible citizens losing their voting rights. The database, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, has existed for decades to verify citizenship and immigration status for government benefits. But the Trump administration revamped it starting last year, linking it to Social Security Administration records that cover most Americans.
The administration encouraged election officials to upload entire state registration rolls in bulk and waived any fee to do so. Tens of millions of records were run through the system before a federal judge blocked its use earlier this year. Friday's ruling allows SAVE to be used again for reviewing voter rolls.
What the Court Allowed
The Supreme Court's opinion said SAVE can be used for "individualized" checks of a voter's citizenship in the upcoming election. It also noted that federal law prohibits mass purges close to Election Day. The administration has argued that the federal ban on mass removals within 90 days of an election doesn't apply to purges involving noncitizens who were improperly registered in the first place. The Supreme Court is expected to decide that question in a case this coming term, but not before the midterms.
The Justice Department has also been seeking each state's full, unredacted voter lists, including personal information such as full dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, to check whether states are complying with federal law. When states refused, the department sued and has lost all 25 cases in which a judge has ruled.
Reliability Questions and Real-World Impact
CNN reported the ruling came as the court allowed states to use a Trump administration-backed tool to ferret out noncitizen voting, which there's little evidence occurs in a widespread way. The move raised concern that legal citizen voters could find themselves unable to cast ballots. Critics worry the tool isn't reliable. Texas officials ran all 18 million names of its voters through SAVE last year and announced 2,724 potential noncitizens. Those numbers later fell as local officials reviewed them, in part because the system doesn't appear to properly track naturalized citizens.
Texas officials later announced that hundreds of potential noncitizens flagged last year were indeed Americans and eligible to vote, and called on local officials to reinstate their registrations if they had been removed. A Texas resident who was born in Argentina and later became a naturalized US citizen was tagged as a suspected noncitizen but was able to remain a voter after sending in a scan of her US passport.
Broader Data-Sharing Efforts
Federal agencies have also moved forward with efforts to find potential noncitizens on voting rolls using publicly available voter lists. A recent whistleblower complaint released by several Democrats on Capitol Hill alleged that agents in the Department of Homeland Security, who were tasked with rooting out voter fraud, were being kept in the dark about the sources of some of the data used in their reviews.
The New York Times described the database as expansive, combining citizenship information, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data for voter screening. It said the Supreme Court's action was part of a broader fight over noncitizen voting and voter integrity.
Why This Matters:
This ruling affects the voting rights of millions of Americans just weeks before a major election. The evidence from Texas shows the system's flaws: hundreds of eligible voters were wrongly flagged as noncitizens, many of them naturalized citizens whose records weren't properly updated. When voter purges happen close to elections, eligible voters may not have time to correct errors before ballots are cast. The administration's push comes despite little evidence of widespread noncitizen voting, raising questions about whether the real impact will be to suppress legitimate votes rather than prevent fraud. The court's decision to allow the database's use before fully resolving whether mass purges violate federal law means states can move forward with screenings that may disenfranchise citizens. With the Justice Department losing all 25 cases where it sued states for voter lists, and whistleblowers raising concerns about data sources, the transparency and accuracy of these screening efforts remain deeply uncertain.