Supreme Court OKs use of federal citizenship tool to vet voters, but midterm impact will be limited

This article was originally published by Votebeat.

The Supreme Court cleared the way Friday for election officials to resume using a federal immigration status verification system to check voter rolls for potential noncitizens — a significant victory for President Donald Trump’s administration, but one that’s likely to have little impact on the November midterm elections.

The unsigned opinion hit pause on a lower court’s ruling from June while the case works its way through the appeals process. The lower court had found that the Department of Homeland Security had violated voter privacy by expanding the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, better known as SAVE, so that states could run their voter rolls through it to check for any noncitizens.

Friday’s ruling is not expected to lead to any widespread removal of voters before the November election because federal law prohibits election officials from systematically unregistering voters within 90 days of an election.

However, as a result of the ruling, the Trump administration will be able to restart use of the SAVE system to scrutinize state voter rolls after the election, and election officials will be able to use the SAVE system to check the citizenship of individual voters in the meantime as well.

The Department of Homeland Security has maintained the SAVE system for decades to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. But in 2025, the Trump administration revamped the tool to allow election officials to check voter rolls in bulk against federal citizenship and immigration records and to search using Social Security numbers, making it far easier to screen registered voters for potential noncitizens.

The case against the expanded SAVE was brought by a coalition of groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, that argued that the Trump administration violated Americans’ privacy by expanding how the system is used.

“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” Abigail Kunkler, an attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs.

She said the case “is not over” and noted the lower court had ruled that the expanded SAVE violates 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.”

Trump administration officials celebrated the court victory.

“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,” James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, said on X in reaction to the decision.

The Department of Homeland Security has said that election officials in 25 states, mostly Republicans, have run their voter rolls through the SAVE system. Some of those officials praised SAVE as a valuable tool for weeding out ineligible voters, but others have found it to be unreliable.

A ProPublica investigation from earlier this year found that the Trump administration’s rush to turn the system into a voter verification tool made it prone to false positives. In at least five different states, the system has flagged people as noncitizens who were actually citizens.

In Texas, Votebeat reported that the system flagged hundreds of people who had registered to vote through the state Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship from any prospective registrants. State and local election officials have confirmed that several of those people are indeed eligible to vote.

In a dissent to Friday’s opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the problems in Texas as a main reason she opposed the Trump administration’s use of the SAVE system to check voter rolls. Jackson noted that one plaintiff in the case had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge and that two others had to provide proof of citizenship to remain on voter rolls.

“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,” she wrote.

Jackson was joined in her dissent by the court’s two other liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The ruling was a rare victory for Trump in his effort to impose more federal control over the country’s electoral system. Federal courts have dismissed 25 Department of Justice lawsuits seeking states’ unredacted voter rolls, with the federal government yet to prevail in a single one.

The president has also failed to get the SAVE Act or SAVE America Act through Congress, two bills that would have required Americans to prove their citizenship before registering to vote. (Despite their names, they are not related to the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system.) And earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that proposed Trump administration rules that would have given the U.S. Postal Service the ability to restrict the delivery of mail ballots could not go into effect for the 2026 election.