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The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the Trump administration can check Social Security numbers, citizenship status and other data to determine eligibility to vote in the Nov. 3 midterm elections, reversing a lower court order and handing the White House a temporary victory on one of its pet issues.
In an unsigned per curiam opinion, the court’s six conservative justices said that the Department of Homeland Security could use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system “to conduct individualized inquiries” (emphasis original), warning that it was already too late in the 2026 cycle for state and local officials to conduct mass purges of their voter rolls.
A June ruling by DC US District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had barred DHS from using SAVE, a 40-year-old database created to prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens– and revamped in response to President Trump’s March 2025 executive order meant to ensure only Americans vote in national elections.
DHS had added natural-born citizens to the register and allowed bulk searches of the database using names, birthdays and Social Security numbers rather than special identification numbers issued by the agency.
Sooknanan had written in a 75-page opinion that “Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank” and accused the administration of having “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable,” allowing states to “actively remov[e] United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
The court’s majority disagreed, writing: “[T]he Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters. [Sooknanan’s order] prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”
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