Trump's March 25, 2025 executive order on elections directed the Department of Homeland Security to give states no-cost access to federal systems for verifying the citizenship of registered voters. To carry that out, DHS and the Social Security Administration rebuilt the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, from an immigration-status tool for benefits eligibility into a citizenship checker for voter rolls.
CNN reported on April 5, 2026 that the administration was assembling a national voter database through a DOJ-DHS data-sharing agreement, with 50 to 60 million voter records collected from states. An initial review found more than 300,000 deceased registrants and what officials described as tens of thousands of potential noncitizens.
The accuracy record is the heart of the matter, and it is documented on both sides. When states ran their rolls through SAVE independently, the system flagged about 21,000 of 60 million records, roughly 0.00035 percent. In Virginia, 94 percent of the people SAVE flagged as noncitizens turned out to be U.S. citizens. DHS has acknowledged in its own materials that “the SAVE Program may produce inaccurate results,” and it has had to correct information it gave at least five states after the system misidentified voters as noncitizens. The errors fall hardest on naturalized citizens, because citizenship records at different agencies update at different times and a recent naturalization may not have propagated.
Adoption moved faster than the fixes. As of February 2026, 27 states had agreed to use the revamped system to screen their voter rolls against Social Security and passport data.
On June 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan vacated the rebuilt system. She held that the 2025 SAVE modifications and the related privacy notices were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and adopted without the procedure the law requires, finding violations of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Her opinion said the agencies had “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
That did not settle it. On July 7, 2026, U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II in the Northern District of Florida granted an emergency motion by Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana to enforce a settlement agreement with DHS, and the following day a judge ordered DHS to restore the verification tool, which is also used for professional licensing. Two federal courts were issuing conflicting orders about the same system.
The case for the underlying goal should be stated fairly: keeping noncitizens off voter rolls is a legitimate objective, list maintenance is a normal function of election administration, and states asked for a federal citizenship-verification tool for years. What the June ruling turned on was not the goal but the method, specifically repurposing data the government knew was unreliable, without the privacy safeguards Congress attached to it.
The approach did not stop when the tool was vacated. The March 2026 executive order created a second route, directing agencies to compile State Citizenship Lists and send them to states directly, which is now itself being litigated (see Trump Signs an Executive Order Creating Federal Voter Lists and Restricting Mail-In Voting; States Immediately Refuse to Comply and Trump's DOJ Is Now 0-for-26 on Voter Roll Lawsuits, Losing Every Resolved Case for Access to States' Voter Rolls).
Update (September 25, 2026): the Supreme Court stayed the June ruling, 6-3, letting the government use the modified SAVE system while the appeal goes on. A federal appeals court had left the ruling in place. In an unsigned order, the majority found the administration likely to prevail under a 1996 law that lets DHS obtain citizenship and immigration information from other federal agencies, and wrote, “The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.” It noted that federal law bars systematic purges of voter rolls within 90 days of an election, which limits the ruling's reach before November, though individual inquiries remain permitted.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented: “[T]he 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.” States' use of SAVE is voluntary. At least 67 million registrations have been run through it, the Associated Press reported, and in Travis County, Texas, officials found that at least 10 percent, and likely up to 21 percent, of 97 voters it flagged as apparent noncitizens were citizens. DHS general counsel James Percival: “Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting.”
Update (September 28, 2026): the Department of Homeland Security has said election officials in 25 states, mostly Republicans, have run their voter rolls through SAVE, Votebeat reported, and in Texas the system flagged hundreds of people who had registered through the Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship; several have been confirmed eligible. Georgia will not use SAVE on its rolls before the midterms, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told WSB Radio, though he said it had produced “maybe a few false negatives” and the state plans to resume next year. Justice Jackson's dissent described the majority as looking at only one side of the scale, “the judicial equivalent of expecting a seesaw with weight applied on only one side to work properly.”
A separate federal effort to build state-by-state “voter eligibility lists” is also in court. At a September 25 hearing in Maryland on a privacy group's lawsuit, Justice Department attorney Joshua Schopf would not rule out launching the lists before the election, Democracy Docket reported: “I cannot say. I can't tell you we won't have a live portal before the midterms.” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis: “That is very concerning. How can that be?” The government objected to her request for advance notice before any launch. Democracy Docket is the only outlet to report those courtroom exchanges; Reuters confirmed that Schopf did not say when the portal would go live or rule out activating it before the election.
Update (September 29, 2026): Xinis put the notice requirement in a written order the same day. The government must “file a NOTICE with this Court thirty (30) days in advance of any activation of the portal or provision of state citizenship lists,” and, if it intends to act sooner, must give notice immediately with the planned date. It is a notice requirement, not a bar, and her ruling on whether the lists and portal are lawful is still pending. A separate Justice Department filing shows the State Department has told Congress it plans a new routine use for passport records, allowing them to be shared through federal verification platforms for checking identity or citizenship, including “voter eligibility.” By the government's own timetable the change cannot be published in the Federal Register until 30 days after September 22, with a further comment period after that.
Update (October 2, 2026): More is known about the passport plan. In its September 22 notice to the court, the government quotes the proposed routine use, which “permits information sharing with various entities utilizing federal government verification platforms, for the purpose of verifying the identity or citizenship for users accessing government websites and applications, voter eligibility, and other governmental services.” The 2015 version of the passport records notice says nothing about voting. Bloomberg, which obtained the notice sent to Congress, reported that the State Department is moving to give state and local officials, “as well as potentially some nonprofit organisations,” access to passport records to verify voters' citizenship; NOTUS reported the notice lists “unspecified nonprofit organizations” as potential recipients and that it is “highly unlikely to take effect until after the Nov. 3 midterms.” A State Department spokesperson said “it is basic common sense for the US government to use all the information available across agencies to protect election integrity.” Anna Baldwin of the Campaign Legal Center, which is suing over the database, called the proposal “not just unprecedented but unlawful.”