US Citizens 'Could Lose Their Right to Vote' After Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Trump's Voter Purge Database

Many eligible voters may be at risk of having their voter registrations wrongfully canceled just weeks before the midterms after the US Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to screen voters using a database known for flagging naturalized citizens.

In a 6-3 decision, the court's conservative majority lifted a lower court order that blocked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using and expanding the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database—whose original purpose was to check if noncitizens qualified for government benefits—to trawl through state voter rolls and link them to information supposedly confirming citizenship.

The expanded SAVE system relied upon by the Trump administration has also incorporated federal immigration and Social Security records that can be outdated.

"Because Social Security data was never intended for verifying voter eligibility, [the Social Security Administration] has no reason to keep people’s immigration status up to date in cases where it isn’t relevant for their benefits," explained Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, on Friday.

"As a result," she said, "US citizens could wrongfully lose their right to vote."

Investigations and court records have documented eligible US citizens being wrongly targeted by voter-purge systems using flawed citizenship data. In Missouri and Texas, for example, investigations have found that the system wrongly flagged hundreds of eligible voters as noncitizens, often those born outside the US who have since become naturalized.

Halting the SAVE system's implementation in June, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the US District Court in Washington, DC, wrote that the Trump administration had “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."

But the Supreme Court's conservatives wrote on Friday, in an unsigned majority opinion, that the lower court's block on the use of SAVE impeded “the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”

In her dissent, the liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized that "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."

The court did not issue a final ruling on SAVE's legality to scrutinize voting rolls. But the timing—less than six weeks before the November 3 midterm elections—means the administration can potentially use it to direct states to identify and purge purported noncitizens on their voter rolls.

"The Supreme Court’s decision today wrongly lifts the burden from DHS and puts it on the shoulders of voters," Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, told Common Dreams. "The SAVE database has known errors, including incorrectly flagging numerous eligible citizens, such as recently naturalized citizens, as noncitizens."

"Now more than ever," she said, "voters must check their registration well in advance of Election Day to ensure they are not swept up in a flawed system through no fault of their own."

Jon Sherman, the litigation director for the Fair Elections Center, told Common Dreams that the court's ruling did contain a "silver lining." It "acknowledged that the National Voter Registration Act cuts off systematic voter removal programs 90 days before a federal election." However, voters could still be individually flagged as potential noncitizens.

The use of citizenship data is part of a larger effort by Trump to "nationalize" voting to clamp down on what he claims, without evidence, is a rash of noncitizens voting. He has used unsubstantiated claims of mass illegal voting to justify his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court refused to let Trump enforce another portion of his voting executive order, which would have had the US Postal Service block mail-in ballots in states that did not turn over information about mail-in voters to the federal government.

There is little evidence that noncitizen voting, or voter fraud more generally, is a significant problem: The right-wing Heritage Foundation's nationwide database of alleged instances of voter fraud identifies just 99 total cases of suspected noncitizen voting dating back to the year 2000.

A Brookings Institution review of that data in 2024 found that across several swing states, all forms of fraud impacted less than one vote for every million, far below what would be needed to swing an election.

"The Supreme Court’s decision to allow DHS and states to use an error-ridden system is completely unacceptable and didn’t need to happen this close to the election," said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and CEO of the watchdog group Common Cause. "This DHS system, which the federal government itself admits is flawed, has always been part of the Trump administration’s campaign to interfere in our elections and sow distrust—and it will fail."

The legal challenge to the SAVE database was brought by the League of Women Voters and several state affiliates, along with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who are represented by Democracy Forward, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the Fair Elections Center.

The coalition said Friday's decision was "profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections."

"However, this case is not over," it said. "The DC District Court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws. We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands."

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said that with Friday's ruling, the Supreme Court had upheld a "Trump administration voter-suppression tactic."

"It's disappointing that the Supreme Court decided to capitulate to and enable an authoritarian, again," she said. "States must hold the line and do everything in their power to protect voting rights and our democracy!"