Supreme Court Revives Expanded Voter Database

A divided Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to revive an expanded federal database used to check the citizenship of registered voters, granting emergency relief that pauses a lower-court ruling that had blocked the system as unlawful.

The 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines with the conservative justices in the majority, clears the way for the administration to again use the revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, as it encourages states to scrub their voter rolls less than six weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. According to NBC News, the court’s unsigned ruling noted that the National Voter Registration Act bars the broad purging of voter rolls in the weeks before a federal election, a limit that “limits the potential impact” of the decision this year. States can still make individualized queries about voters.

A Benefits Tool Turned Election Tool

SAVE was created by Congress in 1986 so that government agencies could quickly verify someone’s immigration status when they applied for benefits such as Social Security. For decades it was of little use for checking voters: election officials would have needed each voter’s Department of Homeland Security immigration identification number, which is not collected at registration, and searches had to be run one at a time, for a fee.

That changed after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 requiring agencies to take steps to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote. The administration overhauled SAVE by linking it to Social Security Administration records, enabling searches by Social Security number, and allowing states to run bulk queries.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that, since May 2025, the updated system had verified more than 65 million voters across 26 states and flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens. Arguing that the lower court’s injunction “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections,” he maintained that “SAVE does not disqualify any voter; instead, it merely notifies the States whether the federal government can confirm citizenship.”

A Record of Mistakes

Critics say the system’s data is unreliable and that its errors fall hardest on naturalized citizens. A ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation published in February found that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data, producing persistent misidentifications, especially for people born outside the United States.

“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, wrote in June when she blocked the expanded system, finding it violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. The D.C. Circuit refused to stay her ruling in a 2-1 vote, prompting the administration’s emergency appeal.

The practical consequences have been visible in the states that moved fastest. Texas ran its entire list of more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE, and the state initially flagged 2,724 people as potential noncitizens. A September press release from the Texas secretary of state later revealed that 578 of those voters demonstrated citizenship, including 506 whose citizenship was confirmed only after passport information was added to SAVE following the state’s initial run. The state referred 117 cases — about 4.2% of those flagged — for investigation of possible noncitizen voting.

“I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Frank Phillips, the elections administrator in Denton County, Texas, told ProPublica and the Tribune. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”

How Rare Is Noncitizen Voting?

The legal fight has unfolded against a backdrop of long-standing evidence that noncitizen registration and voting are vanishingly rare. As NPR reported, at least seven states with a combined total of about 35 million registered voters publicly reported their SAVE results, identifying roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01% of those registered — as noncitizens. In Texas, just three people have been charged with voting illegally as a noncitizen, despite the state screening its full voter roll.

The pattern echoes a 2019 episode in Texas, when state officials had to abandon a voter-roll purge after it became clear their methodology misidentified thousands of citizens, many of them naturalized. Election administrators have also warned that the current tool cannot always retrieve the most current citizenship information for people who naturalize after receiving a Social Security number.

“This is not ready for prime time,” Brianna Lennon, the top election official in Boone County, Missouri, told ProPublica and the Tribune. “And I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.”

The Dissent and the Road Ahead

In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the government had not shown enough to justify blocking the lower court ruling, warning that states might cancel the registrations of recently naturalized citizens or force them to provide proof of citizenship before voting.

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote, according to NBC News. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined her, while noting that states could still use the system for individualized voter-roll maintenance.

The ruling is a preliminary stay, not a final resolution; the court signaled it is likely to reverse the district court when it considers the merits. In the meantime, several questions remain open. It is unclear whether the administration will move to use the expanded system for individualized removals in the weeks before the midterms, and whether the government will disclose SAVE’s error rate and how many Americans were forced to re-verify their citizenship.

A separate Trump administration project — an executive order directing agencies to compile state-by-state lists of adult U.S. citizens — is still underway and facing its own legal challenge. With voting already underway in some states, the fight over how citizenship is verified is far from settled.