Supreme Court temporarily allows expanded voter-citizenship database

The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily allowed the Trump administration to use an expanded federal database to help states check voters’ citizenship while litigation over the system continues.

The court’s emergency order lifted a lower-court restriction on the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE. Created to verify the immigration or citizenship status of applicants for public benefits, SAVE was expanded in 2025 to support bulk searches using Social Security data. States may choose whether to use the system.

The court said federal law permits DHS to seek citizenship and immigration information from other agencies. Its order does not resolve the underlying legal challenge. Federal law also generally prohibits broad voter-roll purges within 90 days of an election, although states may still investigate individual registrations.

The court’s three liberal justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that disenfranchising even a small number of eligible voters would outweigh the government’s harm from being temporarily prevented from using a system it may lack authority to operate.

Voting-rights groups say SAVE may rely on outdated or inaccurate citizenship records and could wrongly flag eligible voters. The administration argues that the program helps states verify voter eligibility. A federal district judge had previously found that the expanded system violated Americans’ privacy rights, and an appeals court had left that ruling in place before the Supreme Court intervened.