Supreme Court Allows States to Use Expanded SAVE Database for Voter Citizenship Checks

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday lifted lower court restrictions on the expanded SAVE database, permitting states to voluntarily use the federal system to verify voter citizenship. The 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines with conservative justices in the majority, reversed injunctions from lower courts that had found the expanded database likely unlawful and posed risks of wrongly removing eligible voters from rolls.

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program was originally created by Congress in 1986 to help federal agencies determine immigration status when applicants sought benefits. The Trump administration expanded the database in 2025 after an executive order directing agencies to ensure only U.S. citizens vote in elections. The expansion added Social Security Administration data, enabling searches by Social Security number and bulk database queries.

The Supreme Court majority stated that a 1996 law explicitly permits the Department of Homeland Security to obtain citizenship information from other federal agencies and that the federal government has "an obligation to respond" to state requests for voter citizenship verification. The court noted that the National Voter Registration Act restricts systematic voter roll purges in the 90 days before elections, which "limits the potential impact" of the decision in 2026. However, states may still make individualized citizenship queries.

Lower courts and voting rights groups had challenged the expanded SAVE system, arguing it violated the Social Security Act, Privacy Act, and Administrative Procedures Act. Critics cited documented accuracy problems: in Travis County, Texas, officials found that 10 to 21 percent of voters flagged by SAVE were actually U.S. citizens, including newly naturalized citizens. Texas and other states had already scanned tens of millions of voter registrations through the system.

Dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote that "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." Voting rights advocates called the ruling "profoundly disappointing" and pledged to continue legal challenges at the district court level. Election experts noted that adoption of SAVE by states remains voluntary and uncertain, and that most states have historically resisted federal pressure to share voter data or cede registration control.