WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for states to use an expanded federal citizenship-verification database to check voter rolls ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, handing President Donald Trump a significant victory in a 6-3 unsigned decision.
The ruling lifts a June order by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who had found that the Department of Homeland Security’s overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system — a database dating to 1986 that is now linked to Social Security records and enabled for bulk queries — violated federal privacy law.
The administration says the updated SAVE system has verified more than 65 million voters across 26 states since May 2025 and flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens.
The court’s unsigned order emphasized that checks must be “individualized,” and signaled that federal law bars mass voter purges within 90 days of an election. Litigation over the system’s legality continues in the lower court.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented, writing that the harm of “burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm” to the government.
Voting-rights groups warn the database risks wrongly flagging naturalized citizens, while the administration argues it is a necessary tool against noncitizen voting.