Supreme Court has revived for now a federal data system the Department of Homeland Security revamped into a tool to check the citizenship of millions of Americans on voter rolls. The tool has mistakenly flagged some eligible voters as potential noncitizens. The news comes as the Trump administration has been pouring resources into searching for noncitizens on voter rolls ahead of the upcoming election.
The Supreme Court's decision opens the way for the administration to use its expanded version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements data system — known as SAVE — in that hunt, as well as in its unprecedented project of compiling lists of adult citizens in each state. SAVE is a 40-year-old federal data system that was created to check the immigration status of noncitizens to determine their eligibility for public benefits. Then, DHS overhauled SAVE last year by linking it for the first time with Social Security Administration records, which include most Americans.
The overhaul also allowed bulk queries to SAVE, and DHS encouraged states to upload their entire voter rolls to SAVE to verify those registered are U.S. citizens and not listed as deceased in federal records. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, blocked use of the modified version of SAVE, finding that its aggregation and disclosure of sensitive data violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. "The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote," she wrote.
After an appeals court panel refused to stay the lower court's decision in a 2-1 vote, U.S. John Sauer appealed to the Supreme Court earlier this month. In his appeal, Sauer wrote that since May 2025, the updated version of SAVE has verified more than 65 million voters across 26 states, and has flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens.
"The district court's order, however, makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections," he wrote. The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which first challenged the legality of the SAVE overhaul a year ago, argued in a brief to the Supreme Court that Congress has not authorized the federal government to create a "master database of U.S. Citizens," nor does it have data that could do that accurately.
The brief added that multiple statutes restrict repurposing and sharing Americans' sensitive data. "Disregarding these laws, the government has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans' privacy and voting rights," the groups wrote. They wrote that even though 65 million voters had been verified by the revamped SAVE, the government had not yet released the system's error rate, or how many Americans' citizenship was misrepresented "and who consequently have been forced to reverify their citizenship to retain their voter registration or obtain government benefits." Even though Election Day is just over a month away and voting is underway, the Trump administration could try to make use of the expanded version of SAVE right away in its quest to check registered voters' citizenship.
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