The Supreme Court cleared the Trump administration to verify voter citizenship through a federal database ahead of the midterms, reversing a lower-court order that had blocked the checks.
Six conservative justices ruled Friday that the Department of Homeland Security may use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, for individualized inquiries on voter eligibility before the Nov. 3 elections.
The unsigned opinion reversed a June order from D.C. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan that had barred the program. Liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. The New York Post reported the high court restored the tool states have already used to scrub rolls of noncitizens.
The fight sits at the center of a basic question: whether federal records can help states confirm that only American citizens vote. The majority said the federal government has a duty to answer those requests.
SAVE began four decades ago to stop noncitizens from collecting government benefits. After President Trump’s March 2025 executive order aimed at keeping national elections limited to Americans, DHS revamped the system and opened it wider for election officials.
At least 25 states have used it voluntarily since April 2025. Officials have scanned at least 67 million registrations, mostly in red states. The redesign allowed bulk searches by name, birthday, and Social Security number, and it added natural-born citizens to the register so states could run fuller matches.
The majority stressed the program’s limits. DHS could use SAVE “to conduct individualized inquiries.” The justices also noted it is already too late in the 2026 cycle for mass purges of entire rolls.
In plain terms, the Court told the lower court to step aside. “[T]he Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” the majority wrote. Sooknanan’s order, it said, “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”
“[T]he Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters. [Sooknanan’s order] prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”
Reuters reported the Court on Sept. 25 granted the Justice Department’s emergency request after the D.C. Circuit declined to pause Sooknanan’s block. DHS General Counsel James Percival put the stakes bluntly.
“Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting.”
Sooknanan’s 75-page opinion framed the expanded database as a danger. She wrote that “Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank.” She accused the administration of having “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable,” and of allowing states to “actively remov[e] United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and five unnamed U.S. citizens sued DHS, the Justice Department, and the Social Security Administration. They charged that the revamped SAVE violated privacy and voting rights.
Travis County, Texas, officials filed an amicus brief urging the justices to reject the administration’s appeal. They said they investigated 97 voters flagged by SAVE and found at least 11 were U.S. citizens. The state of Texas filed its own brief defending the database.
Justice Jackson’s dissent, joined by Kagan and Sotomayor, weighed those risks heavily against the government’s interest.
“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.”
Breitbart carried the League of Women Voters’ reaction calling the decision “profoundly disappointing” and warning 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 same coverage noted the National Voter Registration Act’s bar on broad purges within 90 days of an election, which limits how far states can go this close to Nov. 3.
Administration court filings showed DHS kept using Social Security Administration data “in certain cases to verify information and help determine whether illegal voting may have occurred” even while the lower-court order stood. In August, DHS launched its own probe to find noncitizen voters on state rolls. A federal whistleblower alleged the effort was rushed, error-filled, and potentially at odds with state laws. DHS insisted the work was being conducted “diligently and professionally.”
Republican-led states have compared voter lists to the expanded system and canceled some registrations flagged as potential noncitizens. The Supreme Court’s order does not invent a new power. It restores the federal government’s ability to answer state requests with the records it already holds.
Election integrity is not a theoretical debate for the people who live with the results. When noncitizens stay on the rolls, lawful voters lose relative weight. When officials cannot check citizenship against federal data, they are left guessing with incomplete files. The majority treated that gap as a problem the government is obliged to close, not a privacy experiment the courts should freeze.
Sooknanan’s order had frozen the tool she called unreliable. The high court disagreed on the balance of harms and on who decides which federal program best answers a lawful state request. Six justices chose the obligation to verify over the lower court’s blanket stop.
Only citizens get a ballot. The Supreme Court just made sure federal data can help prove it.
