Supreme Court restores Trump administration’s voter citizenship checks ahead of midterms

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way Sept. 25 for state and local election officials to use the Trump administration’s expanded federal database to check voters’ citizenship ahead of the November midterms, a system the administration says will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls and combat voter fraud.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily pause a lower court ruling that had halted the revised Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. The case continues in the lower courts.

“The Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” the majority wrote, adding that the lower court order “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

The majority said that claims from voting groups about the legality of the modified database “likely lack merit” because federal law authorizes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration.

In 2025, the Trump administration expanded the SAVE system, which agencies had long used to check eligibility for government benefits. The changes allow officials to check multiple voter records at once using federal immigration and Social Security information to ensure no noncitizens vote in U.S. elections.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. She argued 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 Department of Justice (DOJ) had asked the Supreme Court to intervene after U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington blocked the revised system in June and a divided appeals court declined to lift that order Sept. 4. 

>> Court blocks federal citizenship database used to verify voter eligibility <<

Sooknanan, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote in the June ruling that the Trump administration “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote” through the overhauled SAVE system.

The Trump administration argued that the block hindered efforts to verify citizenship before the elections, writing that the judge’s “indefensible” order “threatens the integrity” of the midterm elections.

According to the DOJ’s filing, 27 states used SAVE for voter checks, making about 60 million queries between January 2025 and April 2026.

The DOJ wrote that Sooknan's order would "irreparably harm the federal government, the States, and the public by depriving the government of an effective tool to verify the eligibility of registered voters and benefits applicants under various state and federal programs."