Supreme Court Allows Trump to Use Flawed Database to Vet Voter Citizenship

On Friday, the Supreme Court approved the Trump administration's use of the controversial Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to identify alleged voter fraud, potentially leading to the wrongful labeling of eligible voters as non-citizens. The conservative majority ruled that the government was likely to succeed at the merits of the case, outweighing concerns over the database's accuracy.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, arguing that burdening or disenfranchising lawful voters was unjustified. The SAVE database, created in 1986, has a history of producing false positives and has been expanded by the Trump administration to include native-born Americans and bolstered with bulk search capabilities. The database's expansion has led to numerous errors, wrongly flagging American citizens and naturalized citizens as non-citizens.