Supreme Court Restores Trump’s Mass Voter Verification System – What Does It Mean Ahead of US Midterm Elections? | Today’s news
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday reinstated an expanded immigrant database that President Donald Trump’s administration said was aimed at fighting the choices of non-citizens. But critics say it could disenfranchise eligible voters.
According to Reuters, justices have granted a Justice Department request to block a judge’s order that prevented state officials from using Social Security numbers and other information to conduct extensive checks on the citizenship status of registered voters based on federal records.
What did the court decide?
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from Friday’s order.
The majority said the plaintiffs’ arguments are likely to fail because federal law expressly authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive information regarding citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration.
In Friday’s dissent, joined by her two fellow liberal justices, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the majority was misreading federal law, according to Bloomberg.
She also pointed to U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s finding that legal voters had their registrations tampered with or challenged.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that “the harm caused by encumbering or disenfranchising even a few legal voters outweighs the non-existent harm the government suffers when it is prevented from taking actions it arguably has no authority to take.”
SAVE: “Prevent non-citizens from voting illegally”
The Trump administration’s data-sharing arrangement is one of a series of moves to boost the federal government’s involvement in voting ahead of November’s midterm elections, as Trump’s Republicans seek to retain control of Congress.
The US Constitution gives the individual states the primary authority to direct and administer elections.
Last year, the Department of Homeland Security overhauled the federal database known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which is used to verify a person’s citizenship and immigration status.
The redesign allowed users to search many records at once and perform searches using individuals’ Social Security numbers.
In a social media post Friday, James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, responded to the post about the court order, saying, “Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to use government data to help states prevent illegal elections.”
Since the federal database was expanded, several Republican-led states have checked their voter rolls against the database, and some voters flagged as potential noncitizens have had their registrations revoked.
Impact on midterm elections
The decision means the Trump administration can deploy the system ahead of November’s midterm elections, when Republicans are defending their narrow majority in Congress in the wake of the Iran conflict and Trump’s tariff war.
Trump says he’s trying to keep noncitizens from voting, though studies have repeatedly found that’s a rare occurrence.
Critics told Reuters that such election-related actions by Republicans are driven less by concerns about election security than by an effort to gain political advantage by narrowing the voter base, risking disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.
Trump pursued a tough policy on immigration and falsely claimed widespread election fraud, including his loss in the 2020 election to former Democratic President Joe Biden.
Advocacy groups suing to block the revised SAVE system said the new approach resulted in people wrongly labeled as non-citizens being removed from voter rolls.
They argued that SAVE may be out of date, meaning that immigrants who have become naturalized US citizens and are therefore eligible to vote are sometimes referred to as noncitizens.
The overall error rate of the modified system is not publicly known. The Department of Homeland Security and Justice did not provide this information when asked.
Citizens for Accountability and Ethics in Washington, which represents the plaintiffs, called Friday’s ruling “deeply disappointing.
They said it puts Americans “at risk of being illegally targeted by the government’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.”
In their Supreme Court filing, the advocacy groups cited an election official in Travis County, Texas, who said 25 percent of noncitizen matches there involved people who had already proven their U.S. citizenship, and reports found that at least 81 percent of the system’s responses in St. Louis, Missouri was wrong.
The voting rights group League of Women Voters and the privacy rights group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in September 2025 to block the Trump administration’s modified system. They said the redevelopment violated federal privacy and other US laws.
In a June ruling blocking the revamped database, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington DC said the system was haphazardly assembled and contained unreliable citizenship data.
“Overall, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a way that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This court cannot stand idly by as this happens.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to halt Sooknanan’s decision in a 2-1 decision on Sept. 4, prompting the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court.
In a Supreme Court filing, Justice Department lawyers called the judge’s order “indefensible” and argued that it “threatens the integrity” of the midterm elections.
Texas, which intervened in the case in support of the administration, disputed claims that the system was unreliable.
Due to separate lawsuits in Florida, the Trump administration was able to continue using its modified SAVE system in the Republican-led states of Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio.
