It is already a federal crime for noncitizens to register and vote, an offence punishable as a felony that can lead to deportation, and research consistently finds it exceptionally rare. Yet the hunt for it has become a defining pursuit of Donald Trump’s second term. On September 25th the Supreme Court handed the president a significant victory in that hunt, lifting restrictions on a federal citizenship database so that states can use it to review their voter rolls within weeks of November’s midterm elections.
The unsigned emergency order set aside a June ruling by Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a federal district judge in Washington, which had blocked the revamped system. NBC News reported the justices dividing 6-3 along ideological lines, with the three liberals dissenting publicly. The majority reasoned that a 1996 law lets the Department of Homeland Security draw citizenship and immigration information from other agencies, and that “the federal government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.” Judge Sooknanan’s order, the court said, “prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, saw the balance differently. “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,” she wrote. The database, she noted, has long been treated as falling under federal privacy law, and the order creates a risk that states might cancel the registrations of recently naturalised citizens or force them to prove their citizenship before voting.
The system at issue, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, was created by Congress in 1986 so agencies could check the immigration status of people applying for benefits. In March 2025 Mr Trump ordered Homeland Security to expand it to cover voter registration. The department linked SAVE to Social Security Administration records, enabled searches by Social Security number, retooled it so states could upload voter lists in bulk, and waived the fee for doing so. According to the Associated Press, at least 67m registrations were scanned through the program before it was blocked.
Its accuracy is the crux of the dispute, and the record is unflattering. Officials in Travis County, Texas, investigated 97 voters flagged as apparent noncitizens and found at least 10%—and probably up to 21%—were citizens, the AP reported. A 2019 Texas test produced 2,700 candidates for removal, of whom 578 were citizens, according to the New York Times. Reporting by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found many of those flagged were newly naturalised citizens. Homeland Security itself concedes its results are not always accurate, and the administration told the court its data reports are not final proof of anything. Nearly 6,000 people in New Jersey were wrongly registered to vote through a software error at the motor-vehicle agency, Governor Mikie Sherrill learned in July—a reminder that registration errors differ from deliberate fraud.
Many flags, few frauds
Texas, which ran its entire list of more than 18m registrations through the expanded system last year, offers the fullest test of its yield. Just three people have been charged with voting illegally as noncitizens, NBC reported. The administration had also claimed Nevada harboured more than 15,000 noncitizens on its rolls; state election officials confirmed those voters were citizens. Texas’s attorney-general, Ken Paxton, announced 33 investigations last June. Even if every one were genuine fraud, it would be minuscule beside an electorate of which some 65% of eligible Texans voted in 2024.
Judge Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, ruled that the overhaul violated laws limiting how federal data may be repurposed, concluding the administration had “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” An appeals court panel voted 2-1 on September 4th to leave her order intact, prompting the emergency appeal. The challengers—voter-advocacy and privacy groups and individual voters, led by the League of Women Voters—accuse the government of “recklessly” creating “an error-laden master citizenship database,” in violation of statutes including the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act. The Supreme Court’s order settles none of that; the district-court case continues.
For now, the practical effect is narrower than the rhetoric. The National Voter Registration Act bars systematic removals from the rolls within 90 days of an election, a “quiet period” the majority said limits the decision’s potential impact; states may still run “individualised” checks and require flagged voters to prove citizenship. Use of the program is voluntary, and Democratic-led states are unlikely to take it up. But the administration argues the moratorium does not apply to purges of noncitizens, and the Republican National Committee has a case making that argument heading to the Supreme Court—a point Friday’s opinion noted it “did not need to decide.” Arguments will come no earlier than December, too late to affect these midterms but with consequences for future ones.
Reactions divided predictably. The plaintiffs called the ruling “profoundly disappointing,” saying it “puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.” Virginia Kase Solomón of Common Cause warned states off mass removals: “If any state official attempts to disenfranchise eligible voters using this flawed database, we will take them to court immediately.” Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative group, said the decision “just makes it easier for states to get federal citizenship data to help them clean up voter rolls.” David Becker of the Centre for Election Innovation and Research suggested that, used voluntarily and alongside other tools, states “may find this to be a useful tool.” D. John Sauer, the solicitor-general, told the court the searches “would not require states, candidates, parties, or voters to do anything.”
The ruling fits a pattern in which Mr Trump’s election agenda has prospered on the court’s emergency docket even as his broader campaign stumbles. Earlier this month the justices rejected his bid to impose stringent mail-ballot procedures before the midterms. Federal courts have dismissed all 25 cases in which the Justice Department sued states for unredacted voter rolls. And a whistleblower has alleged that a separate Homeland Security investigation into noncitizen voting is rushed, error-filled and potentially unlawful; the department insists it is conducted “diligently and professionally.” The president’s SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote, remains stalled in Congress.
The likeliest near-term outcome is therefore modest: some Republican states will resume checking their rolls, some naturalised citizens will receive disquieting letters, and very few fraudsters will emerge. That is a meagre harvest for the machinery deployed. The larger significance lies in the court’s willingness to bless, sight unseen on the merits, a data system it concedes will go largely unused this cycle but whose legality remains in serious doubt. The quiet period may muffle this election; the term’s remaining cases suggest the noise is only deferred.