The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to use a revamped SAVE database and related data-sharing tools to identify potential noncitizen voters. This decision, issued on the emergency docket, intensifies the ongoing struggle over voter screening, privacy, and election rules less than two months before Election Day. The ruling enables a system that critics warn disproportionately targets naturalized citizens and immigrant workers, threatening their participation in the electoral process.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database has existed for decades. It was long used to verify the citizenship and immigration status of individuals seeking government benefits. However, the Trump administration dramatically revamped the system last year, linking it to other government data, most notably Social Security Administration records that cover most Americans.
The administration encouraged election officials to upload their states’ registration rolls in bulk. It waived any fee for this process. Tens of millions of records were run through the system before a federal judge blocked its use earlier this year.
With Friday’s ruling, the Supreme Court allowed SAVE to be used again for reviewing voter rolls. The court’s opinion specified that SAVE can be used for “individualized” checks of a voter’s citizenship in the upcoming election. Federal law, however, prohibits mass purges close to Election Day.
The State's Apparatus
The administration argues that the federal ban on mass removals within 90 days of an election does not apply to purges involving noncitizens who were improperly registered. The Supreme Court is expected to decide this question in a case coming this term, but not before the midterms. This legal maneuvering reveals the state’s active role in shaping the electorate.
The Justice Department has also sought each state’s full, unredacted voter lists, including personal information such as full dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. These demands aimed to check whether states were complying with federal law. When states refused, the department sued, losing all 25 cases in which a judge has ruled against them.
Federal agencies have 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 tasked with rooting out voter fraud were kept in the dark about the sources of some of the data used in their reviews. This opacity further obscures the state’s methods.
Targeting the Electorate
CNN reported that there is little evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. The move raised concerns that legal citizen voters could find themselves unable to cast ballots. The administration’s broader plan to upend mail-in voting writ large was tabled for the next election, but the focus on voter screening persists.
Critics worry the SAVE tool is not reliable. Texas officials ran all 18 million names of its voters through SAVE last year, announcing 2,724 potential noncitizens. Those numbers later fell as local officials reviewed them. The system doesn’t appear to properly track naturalized citizens, leading to false positives.
Texas officials later announced that hundreds of potential noncitizens flagged last year were indeed Americans and eligible to vote. They called on local officials to reinstate their registrations if they had been removed. A Texas resident, born in Argentina and later a naturalized US citizen, was tagged as a suspected noncitizen but remained a voter after sending in a scan of her US passport. These individual cases highlight the system’s flaws and its potential for widespread disenfranchisement.
Maintaining Power
The New York Times described the database as expansive, combining citizenship information, Social Security numbers, and other sensitive data for voter screening. The Supreme Court’s action is part of a broader fight over noncitizen voting and so-called voter integrity. The Hill noted liberal dissents in the emergency docket decision. National Review emphasized the legal and procedural aspects of these decisions, which advance the Trump administration’s voter-identification framework. These actions, framed as ensuring integrity, serve to consolidate political power by restricting access to the ballot box for segments of the working class and immigrant communities.