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The Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to use a controversial government program in its aggressive search for alleged voter fraud, increasing the likelihood that eligible voters will be wrongly labeled as noncitizens due to faulty data and removed from the rolls.
The court’s conservative majority wrote that the government was likely to prevail on the merits of the case, overturning a district court order blocking the Trump administration’s use of the program. “The District Court’s order thus inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections,” the GOP-appointed justices wrote in an unsigned opinion. “Under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented on behalf of the court’s three Democratic appointees. “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.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database run by the Department of Homeland Security has a long and documented history of producing false positives of noncitizens voting, leading to sensational headlines of alleged voter fraud that turn out to be untrue on closer inspection. The database was created in 1986 to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits but has been dramatically expanded by the Trump administration to check voter eligibility and produce federal citizenship lists that could supplant state voter rolls.
Following an executive order by Trump in March 2025, the administration revamped the database to add information on native-born Americans, Social Security numbers, and the ability to do bulk searches, all of which increase the possibility that eligible voters will be wrongly tagged as noncitizens and have their voter registrations canceled at the state level. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis and I reported last year, while “using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up many—if any—noncitizen voters, the massive expansion of the program is likely to wrongly flag some American citizens as noncitizens, particularly naturalized citizens, newly married people who changed their last names, and people whose names don’t match on their documents.”
A federal district court blocked the Trump administration from using the expanded database in June following a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” An appeals court in Washington, DC, upheld Sooknanan’s opinion, but the administration appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming that the injunction “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections.”
However, there’s a lot of evidence that inaccuracies in the SAVE database have undermined the confidence of voters and election officials. As Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby wrote for Popular Information:
Shortly after Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search the database for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.
Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.
In Missouri, for example, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. For St. Louis County, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. But the county immediately determined that 35 percent of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133—meaning at least 81 percent of SAVE’s noncitizen results were incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and have 90 days to appeal.
Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be US citizens—our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”
Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, SAVE identified 84 supposed noncitizens registered to vote. Twelve responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, even though county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.
“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”
As the Brennan Center for Justice concluded, “the SAVE program’s underlying flaws, its hasty overhaul, and the government’s failure to provide proper guidance to state and local officials on responsible use of the expanded tool all mean that the SAVE program has produced numerous errors that falsely identify voters as noncitizens.”
Justice Jackson highlighted these faults in her dissent. “Even more concerning is the majority’s omission of any consideration of the harms that might occur if the modified SAVE system is allowed to continue operating,” she wrote. “The District Court highlighted such harms, noting the risk that States might cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or force such persons to provide proof of citizenship before voting. That court also found that those harms have already materialized in Texas, where one of Respondents’ members ‘had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge,’ and two more ‘had to provide proof of citizenship to maintain registered voter status.’ But the per curiam’s purported balancing fails to address, much less account for, the demonstrated harms of issuing a stay.”
The Trump administration’s expansion of the SAVE database is just one facet of its voter fraud crusade. DHS has enlisted hundreds of agents to search for noncitizen voting (which studies show is incredibly rare) as part of its “Unlawful Voter Initiative” ahead of the midterms, an effort that seems designed to validate Trump’s lies. A recent disclosure by a DHS whistleblower alleges that the department has broken numerous state laws as part of this initiative, with immigration agents falsely posing as voters to access state voter databases and wrongly sweeping up US citizens in its overzealous investigations.
Trump’s DHS has already made a number of debunked claims about alleged voter fraud. Following Trump’s primetime speech in July on election integrity, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that 15,903 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada. A month later, DHS confirmed that number was actually “just 185 potential noncitizens,” according to the New York Times, and Nevada officials subsequently confirmed the number was actually…zero.
The impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday could be muted for the 2026 elections, however, because the National Voter Registration Act precludes states from removing voters ninety days before an election. It is “too late for States to use SAVE for systematic voter-list maintenance in advance of the 2026 elections,” Jackson wrote. “If there is a bright side to today’s opinion…it is that the per curiam will likely have minimal short-term impact, as States will at most conduct individualized voter-roll maintenance using the modified SAVE system ahead of the November elections.”
Still, thanks to the Supreme Court, the administration can now use the SAVE database to produce more outrageous claims of voter fraud, which will be used by the president to undermine and challenge the results of the midterms, no matter how false those assertions turn out to be.
