The Supreme Court cleared the Trump administration to run individualized citizenship checks on voter rolls with a federal database ahead of the midterms, reversing a lower-court ban.
Six conservative justices issued an unsigned per curiam opinion Friday allowing the Department of Homeland Security to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, for targeted inquiries into Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and related data. The ruling restores a tool the White House has tied directly to keeping noncitizens off the rolls for the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
The New York Post reported that the decision overturned a June order from D.C. U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan that had blocked DHS from deploying the system. The high court stressed that the federal government has a duty to answer state and local election officials who request help confirming who is eligible to vote.
SAVE is a 40-year-old database originally built to stop government benefits from going to noncitizens. President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, aimed at ensuring only Americans vote in national elections, prompted a revamp that let states run bulk searches with names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers and added natural-born citizens to the register.
At least 25 states have voluntarily used the upgraded system since April 2025. Officials have scanned at least 67 million registrations, mainly in red states. The court noted it is already too late in the 2026 cycle for mass purges, limiting the immediate scale of any cleanup.
Judge Sooknanan’s 75-page opinion had barred DHS from the SAVE checks after the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and five unnamed U.S. citizens sued DHS, the Justice Department, and the Social Security Administration. The groups charged that the revamped database violated privacy and voting rights.
Sooknanan wrote that “Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank.” She accused the administration of having “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable,” and of allowing states to “actively remov[e] United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
That injunction left election officials without the federal program many considered best suited for the job. The Supreme Court majority rejected that outcome in language that put the obligation squarely on Washington.
"[T]he Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters. [Sooknanan’s order] prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task."
The justices limited the green light to “individualized inquiries,” emphasizing the word in the opinion. That framing keeps the door open for state requests while stopping short of blanket federal sweeps this late in the cycle. Similar high-court moves on election rules have drawn close watch, including when the Supreme Court cleared a Trump voter verification system in a separate 6-3 posture ahead of midterms.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. She argued the balance of harms ran the other way.
"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."
The dissent framed the government’s interest as empty and treated any risk to a lawful voter as decisive. The majority treated the federal duty to assist states as real and the chosen tool as legitimate for case-by-case checks.
Travis County, Texas, officials, covering the state capital of Austin, filed an amicus brief urging the court to leave the lower-court ban in place. They said they investigated 97 voters flagged by SAVE and found at least 11 were U.S. citizens. The state of Texas filed its own brief defending the database.
Those competing filings underscored the practical fight on the ground: some local officials highlight false positives, while the state and the administration defend the system as a necessary check against noncitizen registration. Federal courts have repeatedly stepped into election administration fights this cycle, from citizenship tools to map disputes such as when the Supreme Court blocked Missouri’s redrawn congressional map a second time.
Even while the SAVE program sat blocked for months, administration court filings stated that DHS officials continued using Social Security Administration data “in certain cases to verify information and help determine whether illegal voting may have occurred.” The limited workaround showed the White House refused to abandon eligibility verification entirely.
In August, DHS launched its own investigation to locate noncitizen voters already on state rolls. A federal whistleblower claimed the effort was rushed, filled with errors, and potentially violated state laws. DHS answered that the probe is being conducted “diligently and professionally.”
The clash fits a broader pattern of election-integrity tools meeting immediate lawsuits and nationwide injunctions. Readers following the court’s election docket have seen parallel interventions, including when the Supreme Court halted Missouri’s redrawn map ahead of the November vote and when an Eighth Circuit revived Missouri’s Republican-drawn map over earlier objections.
The Friday order hands the Trump administration a clear procedural win on a core campaign promise: only citizens cast ballots. It does not invent new authority so much as restore a long-standing federal database to the task of answering state requests. Whether states now file more individualized queries before Nov. 3 will test how far the ruling travels in the final weeks.
Lawful voters and taxpayers deserve rolls that match the law. Courts that treat basic citizenship verification as the greater threat reverse the proper order of priorities.
