The US Supreme Court has lifted restrictions on the Trump administration's use of a revamped federal database designed to verify the citizenship of voters on state electoral rolls, clearing the way for its use ahead of November's midterm elections.
The system, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, was originally created in 1986 to check the immigration status of non-citizens applying for public benefits. The Trump administration overhauled it last year, linking it for the first time with Social Security Administration records and enabling bulk searches of sensitive data from tens of millions of Americans.
Many states uploaded their entire voter rolls to the expanded system before it was blocked by a federal judge in June. The Supreme Court's ruling on Friday restores access to the modified programme.
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, had ruled in June that the revamped system violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. She found that the federal government had "knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote." A federal appeals court panel refused to stay her ruling in a 2-1 vote before the Supreme Court overrode that decision.
The court's conservative majority ruled that a 1996 law authorises the Department of Homeland Security to seek citizenship and immigration data from federal agencies, and that the government has "an obligation to respond" to states requesting that information. The majority also found that the lower court's order had prevented the federal government "from using the modified SAVE program to conduct individualized inquiries, which are permitted under federal law during this period," and that it inhibited federal efforts to assist states in administering the midterm elections.
The court's three liberal justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored the dissent, raising concern about the risk that states might cancel the voter registrations of recently naturalised citizens or require them to provide proof of citizenship before voting. "The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the non-existent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take," she wrote.
The Trump administration and Republican state officials have argued that the system is lawful and necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting, and that federal law prohibiting the systematic removal of voters within 90 days of an election should not apply to non-citizens who were improperly registered. A total of 27 states currently use the SAVE system to check voter citizenship, though participation remains voluntary.
Critics have questioned the reliability of the database, warning it has already produced errors. Officials in Travis County, Texas, found that of nearly 100 voters identified as non-citizens, at least 10 percent -- and potentially more -- were in fact US citizens, according to reports. Since Texas began using the SAVE system last year, only three non-citizen voters have been charged with illegally casting a ballot in the state.
In 2024, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that 1,930 people with a "voter history" had been removed from electoral rolls out of nearly 18 million registered voters -- figures far below the hundreds of thousands of non-citizen voters that the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security have previously suggested were present on voter rolls nationwide.
The coalition of organisations that challenged the SAVE overhaul, including the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the litigation remains ongoing. "Today's decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration's unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections," the coalition said in a statement. "However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws. We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans' voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands."
Any impact on the midterm elections remains unclear. Federal law bans states from systematically removing voters from rolls within 90 days of a federal election, a restriction the Supreme Court's majority noted limits the potential scope of the ruling in the near term.
