Supreme Court revives Trump-era expanded SAVE database for voter citizenship checks

The US Supreme Court has revived the Trump administration’s expanded SAVE database for voter citizenship checks, voting 6-3 on Friday to block a lower-court order that had halted the system (https://www.reuters.com/world/supreme-court-restores-trumps-mass-voter-verification-system-2026-09-25/).

In an unsigned per curiam opinion, the six conservative justices allowed DHS to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system for “individualised” inquiries. The majority held the government must answer state and local citizenship-verification requests, and said the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day ban on systematic removals near elections limits the immediate impact (https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/25/politics/supreme-court-voter-roll-non-citizen-save).

The ruling reverses June’s order by DC judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, who found SAVE’s aggregation of sensitive data violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens,” she wrote, accusing it of combining data “they knew to be unreliable” (https://www.weku.org/npr-news/2026-09-25/the-supreme-court-revives-a-controversial-data-system-for-citizenship-checks).

DHS overhauled the 40-year-old system last year, linking Social Security records for the first time and allowing bulk searches by name, birthday or Social Security number. It has verified more than 65 million voters across 26 states since May 2025, flagging 28,635 as potential noncitizens (https://www.weku.org/npr-news/2026-09-25/the-supreme-court-revives-a-controversial-data-system-for-citizenship-checks).

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan: “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” (https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/25/politics/supreme-court-voter-roll-non-citizen-save). Critics say SAVE has wrongly flagged eligible voters, and Republican-led states have cancelled flagged registrations (https://www.reuters.com/world/supreme-court-restores-trumps-mass-voter-verification-system-2026-09-25/).