The US Supreme Court has temporarily revived a federal system being used by the Trump administration to check the citizenship of millions of people on voter rolls, despite evidence that eligible voters have been wrongly flagged as potential non-citizens.
The decision allows the Department of Homeland Security to continue using an expanded version of its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, as officials search voter records ahead of the upcoming election.
The administration is also using the system as part of an unprecedented effort to compile state-by-state lists of adult US citizens. The project follows an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in March, which instructed federal agencies to consult SAVE and other records.
Expanded SAVE system faces legal challenge
SAVE was created about 40 years ago to check the immigration status of non-citizens applying for public benefits. Last year, Homeland Security linked it for the first time to Social Security Administration records, which cover most Americans, and enabled states to submit voter rolls in bulk.
The department encouraged states to upload their complete voter lists so that registrations could be checked against citizenship and death records. Solicitor General D John Sauer told the Supreme Court that, since May 2025, the updated system had checked more than 65 million voters across 26 states and identified 28,635 as potential non-citizens.
But in June, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the revised system, ruling that the collection and disclosure of sensitive information breached 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 in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she wrote.
An appeals court panel later declined, by two votes to one, to suspend that ruling. Mr Sauer then appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the lower court’s decision made it more difficult to detect ineligible voters and undermined confidence in federal elections.
The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which challenged the overhaul, said Congress had not authorised the creation of a nationwide database of US citizens. They also argued that existing laws restricted the repurposing and sharing of Americans’ personal information.
“Disregarding these laws, the government has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” the groups said in a filing.
They said the government had not disclosed SAVE’s error rate or how many citizens had been incorrectly identified and then required to prove their citizenship to keep their registrations or obtain benefits.
Texas voter checks wrongly identified citizens
The system’s accuracy has already been questioned following a review of Texas’s 18 million registered voters. SAVE initially flagged 2,724 people as potential non-citizens, after which county election officials gave them 30 days to provide evidence of citizenship.
Citizens were removed from the rolls when they failed to respond within that period. A subsequent statement from the Texas secretary of state said about 20 per cent of those initially flagged were later confirmed as citizens and reinstated.
The statement also said 117 cases, representing 4.2 per cent of those flagged, had been referred for investigation over possible non-citizen voting.
With Election Day little more than a month away and voting already under way, the Trump administration could seek to use the expanded SAVE system immediately. Federal officials have indicated that the separate project to compile state citizen lists remains in progress, although it is also facing a legal challenge.
Federal law generally prevents states from systematically removing voters from their rolls during the 90 days before a federal election. The administration and Republican state officials argue that the restriction should not apply when removing people they believe are improperly registered as non-citizens.
