Supreme Court Lets Trump Administration Revive Voter Citizenship Database Ahead of Midterms

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to resume using an overhauled federal database to check the citizenship of registered voters, granting an emergency stay that lets a program a federal judge had found unlawful operate again just 39 days before the midterm elections.

In a 6-3 unsigned order in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters, the court's conservative majority put on hold a June 22 ruling by a federal judge in Washington that had vacated a retooled version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE. The order came on the court's emergency docket, without full briefing or oral argument, and drew a sharp dissent from the court's three liberal justices, as CBS News reported shortly after the ruling was released.

The modified SAVE system links state and local voter-verification requests to Social Security Administration records covering nearly every American, not just noncitizens, and allows officials to run bulk queries against entire voter rolls rather than checking individuals one at a time. A U.S. district judge concluded in June that the overhaul violated the Social Security Act's confidentiality provisions, the Privacy Act and federal administrative law. The Supreme Court's stay lets the government use the program again while that ruling is appealed.

The Numbers

According to the administration's own filing asking the justices to intervene, the modified SAVE system verified more than 65 million voter records across 26 states between its launch in May 2025 and this month, flagging 28,635 people as potential noncitizens. The government has not disclosed how many of those flags were false positives.

Texas offers one data point. After the state ran its full voter list of roughly 18 million people through the system, SAVE flagged 2,724 as potential noncitizens. County election officials gave each 30 days to prove citizenship, then removed those who did not respond in time under state law. The Texas secretary of state's office later disclosed that about 20 percent of the flagged voters were subsequently confirmed to be citizens and reinstated, while 117 cases — 4.2 percent of those flagged — were referred for investigation of possible noncitizen voting.

Twenty-seven states currently use SAVE in some form to help verify voters' citizenship, according to the government's application to the Supreme Court. A separate provision of federal law bars states from systematically purging voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election, a window that has already begun, limiting how much practical effect Friday's ruling can have before Nov. 3.

How SAVE Was Overhauled

SAVE has existed since 1986, created to help states verify that applicants for public benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps were citizens or lawful immigrants. States began using it to check voter citizenship in 2005, but for two decades it drew almost entirely on Department of Homeland Security immigration records and could only be searched one person at a time, typically by an alien registration number.

That changed after President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 directing DHS to build new tools for state and local officials to verify voters' citizenship and ordering the Social Security Administration to share its records with DHS for that purpose. Two months later, on May 22, 2025, the agencies launched the modified SAVE system, which connects to NUMIDENT, the Social Security Administration's master file containing names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, citizenship indicators and death records for both citizens and noncitizens. If a bulk query cannot confirm someone's citizenship, the local agency is required to contact that person and demand proof, and may strike them from the rolls if they do not respond.

The League of Women Voters, several of its state affiliates and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued DHS and the Social Security Administration soon after, arguing the agencies never published the legally required public notice before sharing Americans' Social Security data this way, and that the new system's stale or inaccurate records put recently naturalized citizens at risk of being wrongly purged. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, an appointee of President Biden, agreed on every count in a June 22 opinion, finding the government had "knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote," and vacated the modified program. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to pause that ruling on Sept. 4, over one judge's dissent, before the administration turned to the Supreme Court.

Who Is Affected

The district court found that harms from the modified system had already materialized. In Texas, one plaintiff group's member had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge, and two others had to submit proof of citizenship to remain registered, according to the district court's findings cited in Friday's dissent. Naturalized citizens are especially exposed, because Social Security records do not always reflect a person's current citizenship status, which can trigger an erroneous flag through no fault of the voter.

The plaintiffs' own filings point to at least one concrete example: a Louisiana member of a plaintiff organization whose Social Security file did not show she had since naturalized, which the majority itself cited in finding she had legal standing to sue. NPR has separately reported on Texans wrongly flagged as noncitizens by the system, including a man named Anthony Nel who submitted a sworn statement in the case describing his experience, and coverage of Friday's ruling noted that the immediate midterm impact remains uncertain even as the legal fight continues.

Reaction

The League of Women Voters and its co-plaintiffs said the decision leaves millions of voters exposed just as the midterm campaign enters its final stretch. "Today's decision is profoundly disappointing, as 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 groups said in a joint statement Friday. "However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated 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."

The unsigned majority opinion framed the equities differently, writing that the district court's order "inhibits the Federal Government's efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections" by blocking even the individualized citizenship checks that remain legal during the pre-election window.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for herself and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in dissent, argued the majority ignored the risk to eligible voters entirely.

"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."

Jackson also disputed the majority's reading of the 1996 immigration statute the government relied on, arguing that its "notwithstanding" clauses were never meant to override the Social Security Act's confidentiality protections, and noted that the government could still rely on the pre-2025 version of SAVE without the disputed modifications.

What Happens Next

Friday's stay, recorded on the case docket as No. 26A308, is not a final ruling on the legality of the modified SAVE system. It stays Judge Sooknanan's June 22 order while the case proceeds on appeal to the D.C. Circuit, and while the losing side may still ask the Supreme Court to take up the case in full through a petition for certiorari. If the justices decline to hear the case, the stay automatically ends; if they grant it, the stay remains in place until the court issues a final judgment.

In the meantime, because the pre-election window already bars states from systematically purging voter rolls, the ruling's practical reach before Nov. 3 is likely limited to individual citizenship checks states or counties initiate on specific voters rather than mass reviews of entire rolls. Plaintiffs' attorneys have said they intend to press ahead with the underlying case in district court, and a related dispute over how far states can go in removing noncitizens close to an election, Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, is separately pending before the court.