US Supreme Court Allows Expanded SAVE Database Ahead of Midterms

The US Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to resume using an expanded federal immigration database to check the citizenship status of registered voters, lifting a lower court order that had barred state officials from running such checks.

The court's 6-3 conservative majority granted the Justice Department's request to set aside the block, which had prevented officials from using Social Security numbers and other data to conduct sweeping verification of voters against federal records. The three liberal justices dissented.

What the majority held

The majority said the plaintiffs' arguments were unlikely to succeed because federal law expressly authorises the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive information on citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing in dissent and joined by her two liberal colleagues, said the majority had misread federal law. She pointed to findings by US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan that lawful voters were having their registrations revoked or questioned.

Jackson wrote that the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the non-existent harm the government suffers when it is prevented from taking an action it likely lacks the authority to take.

The SAVE system

The dispute centres on the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which the Department of Homeland Security redesigned last year. The revamp allowed users to search many records at once and to run searches using individuals' Social Security numbers.

James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a social media post that the government had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so it could use government data to help states stop non-citizens from illegally voting.

Since the database was expanded, several Republican-led states have compared their voter lists against it, and some voters flagged as potential non-citizens have had their registrations cancelled.

Legal challenge

The voting rights group League of Women Voters and the privacy rights group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in September 2025 to block the modified system, arguing that the revamp violated federal privacy and other US laws.

In a June ruling blocking the revamped database, Judge Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., said the system was haphazardly assembled and contained unreliable citizenship data. She wrote that the federal government had knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined in a 2-1 ruling on September 4 to halt Sooknanan's ruling, prompting the administration's request to the Supreme Court. Justice Department lawyers called the judge's order indefensible and said it threatened the integrity of the midterm elections.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the plaintiffs, called Friday's decision profoundly disappointing, saying it puts Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration's unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.

Reliability questions

Advocacy groups that sued said the new approach resulted in people wrongfully identified as non-citizens being removed from voter rolls. They argued that SAVE can be outdated, meaning immigrants who have become naturalised US citizens and are eligible to vote are sometimes labelled non-citizens.

The modified system's overall error rate is not publicly known. The Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department did not provide that information when asked.

In their Supreme Court filing, the advocacy groups cited a Travis County, Texas, election official who said 25 percent of the system's non-citizen matches there involved people who had already proven their US citizenship, and news reports finding that at least 81 percent of the system's responses in St. Louis County, Missouri, were erroneous. Texas, which intervened in the case in support of the administration, has disputed claims that the system is unreliable.

Political backdrop

The decision means the Trump administration can deploy the system in the run-up to the November midterm elections, as Republicans defend their narrow congressional majority. The US Constitution gives individual states the primary authority to run and administer elections.

Trump says he is trying to stop non-citizens from voting, though studies have repeatedly found that to be a rare occurrence. Critics say such election-related actions by Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an attempt to gain political advantage by narrowing the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.

Trump has carried out hardline immigration policies and has made false claims of widespread voting fraud, including in his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Due to separate litigation in Florida, the administration has been able to continue using its modified SAVE system in the Republican-led states of Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio.