In win for Trump, U.S. Supreme Court lets states use revamped voter verification system

The US Supreme Court has overturned a ruling that restricted the Trump administration's use of a contentious federal database, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), which uses citizenship data to identify potential non-citizen voters. Critics had raised concerns about the database's reliability, arguing that it could lead to the wrongful removal of American citizens from voter rolls.

In June, a federal judge had deemed the system illegal, violating privacy rights. However, the Supreme Court's conservative majority ruled that the National Voter Registration Act prevents large-scale purges of voter rolls near an election, thereby limiting the impact of the decision ahead of the midterms. The decision divided the court, with three liberal-leaning justices dissenting, expressing concern over the potential disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

The SAVE program, established in 1986, initially aimed to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals applying for public benefits. Under the Trump administration, the program's scope was expanded to allow for bulk searches using sensitive data from Social Security rolls. In June, a Biden-appointed federal judge ruled that the revised system infringes on the privacy rights of US citizens, threatening their fundamental right to vote.

The federal appeals court upheld the ruling, but the Supreme Court reversed it on Friday, stating that the 1996 law obligates the Department of Homeland Security to comply with state requests for citizenship and immigration data. The use of SAVE by individual states remains voluntary. Despite the court's decision, 27 states currently utilize the program to verify voter citizenship.

However, critics have highlighted instances of errors, such as Travis County, Texas, where nearly 100 voters identified as non-citizens, potentially including 10% or more who were US citizens, according to US media reports. Since implementing SAVE last year, only three non-citizen voters have been charged with illegally voting in Texas.

Throughout his presidency, the Trump administration has sought to modernize the US electoral system, including an unsuccessful attempt to limit mail-in ballots in 2024. For instance, Texas Governor Greg Abbott reported that 1,930 individuals with a history of voting violations were removed from the voter rolls out of nearly 18 million registered voters, significantly fewer than the hundreds of thousands of non-citizen voters Trump and the Department of Homeland Security had previously claimed existed in voter rolls.