The United States Supreme Court has revived a controversial federal voter-eligibility database, granting the Trump administration a temporary victory in its efforts to verify whether registered voters are American citizens. The court's emergency order lifts a lower court ban on the expanded version of the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — known as SAVE — a programme originally designed to prevent government benefits from going to non-citizens, not to police voter rolls. The three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented from the unsigned majority opinion.

The Trump administration significantly expanded SAVE last year, allowing states to cross-check entire voter rolls at once using Social Security numbers and other federal immigration data, rather than searching one name at a time. The court's majority found that a 1996 law explicitly permits DHS to obtain citizenship and immigration data from other federal agencies, and that the government has an obligation to respond to states seeking to verify voter eligibility. The ruling reverses a June decision by U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who had blocked the revamped tool, ruling it violated privacy rights and risked wrongly removing eligible voters from the rolls.

Critics warn those risks are real and already documented. In Travis County, Texas, officials investigated 97 voters flagged as apparent non-citizens and found that between 10% and 21% were in fact U.S. citizens. One affected voter, Anthony Nels — a South African-born naturalised citizen in Denton, Texas — had his registration temporarily cancelled last year despite becoming a citizen more than a decade ago. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in dissent, warned that the database could lead to the disenfranchisement of recently naturalised citizens. "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," Jackson wrote.

The practical effect on the upcoming midterm elections is expected to be limited. Participation in the SAVE programme by states is voluntary — Maine's secretary of state confirmed her state would not change its procedures — and federal law prohibits systematic removal of voters from rolls within 90 days of a federal election, a window that has already begun. Election law experts note that local county clerks, who bear ultimate responsibility for removing registrants, have generally applied additional checks before acting on SAVE flags.

The ruling is part of a broader pattern of federal efforts to reshape election administration, an area the U.S. Constitution traditionally reserves to states and Congress. Research consistently shows that non-citizen voting is extremely rare: ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Georgia found 20 non-citizens among 8.2 million registered voters, and DHS investigations in Trump's second term have led to 160 arrests nationwide out of nearly 228 million registered voters. Critics argue that the administration's push is driven less by documented fraud than by a political strategy to reduce turnout among eligible voters who lean Democratic. Plaintiffs in the case pledged to continue fighting the district court ruling, calling Friday's decision "profoundly disappointing."