US Supreme Court allows Trump to use controversial voter 'verification' system
The US Supreme Court on Friday revived an expanded immigration database that US President Donald Trump's administration says aims to combat voting by noncitizens but that critics say will disenfranchise eligible voters.
The justices granted a Justice Department request to block a judge's order that would have prevented state officials from using Social Security numbers and other information to conduct sweeping checks of the citizenship status of registered voters against federal records.
The administration's data-sharing arrangement is one of a series of actions the federal government has taken to increase its involvement in voting ahead of November's midterm elections.
The US Constitution gives individual states the primary authority to run and administer elections.
The Department of Homeland Security last year redesigned a federal database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify a person's citizenship and immigration status. The revamp allowed users to search many records at a time and to conduct searches using Social Security numbers.
Several Republican-led states have compared their voter lists to the database, and some voters flagged as potential non-citizens have had their registrations cancelled.
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.
In a June ruling blocking the revamped database, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, DC, said the system was haphazardly assembled and contained unreliable citizenship data.
"All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote," Sooknanan wrote.
"This court cannot stand idly by while that happens."
Read moreTrump reviving election fraud claims to contest midterm results, say Democrats
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 ruling on September 4 declined to halt Sooknanan's ruling, prompting the administration's request to the Supreme Court.
In a Supreme Court filing, Justice Department lawyers called the judge's order "indefensible", arguing that it "threatens the integrity" of the midterm elections.
False claims, real fears
Trump has repeatedly made false claims of widespread voting fraud, including in his 2020 election loss to Democratic former president Joe Biden.
Even according to data from the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation, which campaigns against “voter fraud”, cases of noncitizen voting are very rare – and most involve mistakes rather than fraud.
A 2024 review of Heritage Foundation data by the American Immigration Council found the group had found "just 68 cases of proven noncitizen voting dating back to 2000, amounting to less than 0.0001% of total votes”. The Heritage Foundation’s database has grown since 2024, adding an additional 21 cases.
Advocacy groups that sued to block the revised SAVE system said the new approach has resulted in people who were wrongfully identified as noncitizens being kicked off voter rolls. They argued that SAVE information can be outdated, and immigrants who have since become naturalised US citizens and are thus eligible to vote are sometimes labelled as noncitizens.
The modified system's overall error rate is not publicly known. The Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department did not provide that information when asked.
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In their Supreme Court filing, the voter advocacy groups cited a Travis County, Texas, election official who said 25 percent of the system's noncitizen matches involved people who had already proven their US citizenship, as well as news reports finding that at least 81 percent of the system's responses in St. Louis County, Missouri, were erroneous.
The voting rights group League of Women Voters and privacy rights group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in September 2025 to block the Trump administration's modified system. They said that the revamp violated federal privacy and other US laws.
Texas, which intervened in the case in support of the administration, has disputed claims that the system is unreliable.
Due to separate litigation in Florida, the Trump administration has been able to continue using its modified SAVE system in the Republican-led states of Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio.
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