Supreme Court allows Trump to use controversial database to check voter citizenship
The US Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to use a controversial federal database containing citizenship and other sensitive information to identify voters suspected of being non-citizens.
The decision has raised concerns among voting rights advocates, who have questioned the accuracy of the data and warned that eligible US citizens could mistakenly be removed from voter registration lists.
A federal judge ruled in June that the system was unlawful and infringed on Americans’ privacy rights. However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned restrictions on the programme, while noting that the National Voter Registration Act bars broad voter-roll purges shortly before an election. This limits the potential effect of the ruling ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
States, however, remain permitted to verify the citizenship status of individual voters.
The court’s three liberal justices disagreed with the majority ruling. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the programme could wrongly strip eligible citizens of their voting rights.
She argued that the potential harm to even a small number of lawful voters would outweigh any benefit to the government from using a system it may not have legal authority to operate.
The programme, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), is operated by the Department of Homeland Security and allows authorities to verify the eligibility of individuals on voter rolls.
The database was established in 1986 to help government officials confirm the citizenship or immigration status of people seeking public benefits.
The Trump administration expanded the programme last year, allowing officials to conduct bulk searches using sensitive information obtained from Social Security records.
However, US District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, appointed by former President Joe Biden, ruled in June that the expanded system violated the privacy rights of American citizens and posed a threat to their constitutional right to vote.
A federal appeals court allowed that ruling to remain in effect before the Supreme Court intervened on Friday.
The Supreme Court said a 1996 law permits the Department of Homeland Security to obtain citizenship and immigration information from federal agencies and requires it to respond to states requesting such data.
Participation in the SAVE programme by individual states remains voluntary.
The justices said the earlier court order effectively prevented the federal government from using the programme it considered most appropriate for verifying voter eligibility.
Voting rights organisations criticised the Supreme Court’s decision. The League of Women Voters, which is the lead plaintiff in the case, described the ruling as deeply disappointing and warned that millions of Americans could be exposed to what it called unlawful targeting by an unreliable voter database in the weeks before the midterm elections.
The organisation said it would continue efforts to protect voting and privacy rights and preserve the district court’s ruling.
The Trump administration has maintained that the SAVE system is legal and necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting. Twenty-seven states currently use the programme to verify the citizenship of registered voters.
Critics have cited instances in which the system allegedly produced inaccurate results.
In Travis County, Texas, for instance, officials reportedly identified nearly 100 voters as non-citizens, but at least 10% were later found to be US citizens, with the actual figure potentially higher.
Since Texas began using SAVE to review its voter rolls last year, only three non-citizen voters have been charged with illegally casting ballots in the state.
Other states, including Georgia, have also worked with the federal government on the programme.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has defended his office’s use of SAVE and its efforts to improve the system.
He said Georgia officials carefully reviewed the federal data before determining whether individuals flagged by the system were actually non-citizens. In some cases, officials interviewed the voters involved to verify the information.
Raffensperger said safeguards were in place to prevent eligible voters from being denied the right to vote.
Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration has pursued a number of changes to the US electoral system, including an unsuccessful effort to restrict the use of mail-in ballots that was rejected by the Supreme Court.
In 2024, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said 1,930 people with a recorded “voter history” had been removed from the state’s voter rolls, out of nearly 18 million registered voters.
The figure is significantly lower than the hundreds of thousands of non-citizen voters that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have previously claimed were registered to vote.
Source: BBC
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