The Supreme Court on Friday said states can use a controversial citizenship data collection tool for reviewing voter rolls, in a major win for President Donald Trump’s efforts to find noncitizen voters. The unsigned opinion came over three dissents from the court’s liberal justices.
The order reverses a lower court ruling that had blocked the program, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had previously concluded that the administration violated federal privacy law in how it overhauled the data program so it could be used for sweeping reviews of state voter rolls. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling earlier this month before the administration appealed to the justices.
The modified SAVE system links the citizenship database to Social Security Administration records and allows states to run bulk searches against their voter rolls, a capability the program didn’t previously have. The Trump administration had asked the Supreme Court to restore the expanded system, seeking to make it available ahead of November’s midterm elections, after Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to lift the lower-court order. According to Sauer, the system had been processing more than one million requests per day before it was blocked.
While the court’s opinion rejected arguments that the administration likely broke the law, it emphasized the use of the program for “individualized” checks of a voter’s citizenship as the election approaches, while suggesting federal law prohibits mass purges close to Election Day. That distinction matters: federal law bars states from systematically removing voters from rolls within 90 days of a federal election, though the Trump administration and Republican state officials have argued that rule shouldn’t apply to removing noncitizens who were improperly registered.
Advocacy groups say the system’s flaws have already had real consequences. Critics contend the revised SAVE system has resulted in people wrongfully identified as noncitizens being kicked off voter rolls, arguing that the database can be outdated, meaning naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote are sometimes labeled as noncitizens. Despite 65 million voters having been verified through the revamped system, the government has not released SAVE’s error rate or disclosed how many Americans have had their citizenship misrepresented.
In their Supreme Court filing, the advocacy groups cited a Travis County, Texas, election official who said a quarter of the system’s noncitizen matches there involved people who had already proven their U.S. citizenship. The Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department didn’t respond when asked for the system’s overall error rate.
The Trump administration pushed back hard on the lower court’s findings. In its Supreme Court filing, Justice Department lawyers called Sooknanan’s order “indefensible,” arguing it threatened the integrity of the midterm elections. Texas, which intervened in the case in support of the administration, has disputed claims that the system is unreliable.
Trump has long pushed hardline immigration enforcement and has made false claims of widespread voting fraud, including regarding his 2020 election loss to former President Joe Biden, even as studies have repeatedly found noncitizen voting to be a rare occurrence.
Due to separate litigation in Florida, the administration had already been able to continue using its modified SAVE system in the Republican-led states of Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio even while the D.C. case worked its way through the courts. Friday’s ruling extends that access nationwide as states begin preparing their rolls for November.
Friday’s decision means the administration can deploy the system in the run-up to the midterms, as Republicans work to defend their narrow congressional majority. The case will continue in the lower courts even as SAVE remains in use, and further disputes over how the “individualized checks” standard applies in practice appear likely as Election Day approaches.
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