SAVE stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. DHS built it in 1986 to answer a narrow question: is this immigrant eligible for public benefits? For most of its life, a search needed an immigration document number. The system could confirm a noncitizen’s status but had no practical way to confirm a native-born citizen’s. (It has nothing to do with the SAVE America Act, the proof-of-citizenship bill covered in Issue #11.)

That changed in 2025. A March executive order told DHS to give states tools for checking voters’ citizenship. The agency then linked SAVE to Social Security Administration records, allowed searches by Social Security number, and opened bulk uploads, so a state can now submit its whole voter roll at once. Twenty-eight states have signed up to use it: 22 with Republican trifectas, two with Democratic trifectas, and four with divided government. DHS told the Supreme Court that since May 2025 the new system has checked more than 65 million voters in 26 states and flagged 28,635 as possible noncitizens.

The League of Women Voters sued, joined by other voting rights and privacy groups. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia blocked the expanded system. She ruled that pulling Social Security data into it likely broke the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. “All in all,” she wrote, “the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

On September 4, a D.C. Circuit panel voted 2-1 not to pause her ruling. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Robert Wilkins, both Obama appointees, were the majority. Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, dissented. Solicitor General D. John Sauer went to the Supreme Court on September 8. He called the order “indefensible” and argued that it “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections.”

The order is unsigned. It pauses Sooknanan’s ruling while the appeal continues. The majority signaled it would likely overturn her, relying on a 1996 immigration law, 8 U.S.C. § 1373. The justices read that law as likely overriding conflicting privacy limits and likely allowing “an information-sharing system like modified SAVE.” In the order’s words, “The Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.”

Before Election Day, the ruling does less than the headlines suggest. The National Voter Registration Act bars states from removing voters from the rolls in a systematic way within 90 days of a federal election, and that window opened August 5. For now, the order allows individual checks: an election official asking about one specific voter. Mass removals based on bulk matches have to wait until after November 3. State and local officials, not DHS, still make the final call on any voter’s registration.

Federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Supporters argue that election officials have had few reliable ways to confirm citizenship after someone registers, and that the expanded SAVE fills that gap with records the federal government already has. DHS called the original version “older, slower, more cumbersome, and less capable.” The Court’s majority agreed that the lower court’s order “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

Supporters also point to results. Louisiana was the first state to run its rolls through the new system. It found 390 suspected noncitizens on its voter list, and 79 of them had voted in at least one election. DHS reports 160 arrests nationwide for possible noncitizen voting. “Every illegal vote counts against a legal vote,” said Louisiana state Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, a Republican. Supporters add that the system makes no decisions itself. It returns a result, and a state official decides what to do with it. “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,” said DHS General Counsel James Percival. The Republican National Lawyers Association said the ruling “restored common sense, allowing the states to access a longstanding federal resource to clean up their voter registration rolls.”

Critics say the goal isn’t the problem. The data is. Tens of thousands of people become citizens every month, and Social Security records often lag behind, so a newly naturalized voter can show up as a noncitizen. Texas flagged 2,724 of its roughly 18 million voters, and at least 578 of them turned out to be citizens. Utah’s first run flagged 8,836 people. A review cut that to 486, and in the end the state confirmed one noncitizen, who had never voted. “There is not a widespread problem,” said Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, who called SAVE “notoriously inaccurate.” Stephen Richer, a Republican and former Maricopa County recorder in Arizona, called it “a highly-imperfect tool.” Louisiana’s own secretary of state, Republican Nancy Landry, said her results “could be attributed to errors or outdated information” and that noncitizen voting is “not a systemic problem” there. Her 390 suspects were about 0.01 percent of the state’s 2.9 million voters.

The legal objection goes beyond accuracy. The plaintiffs argue that Congress never authorized a “master database of U.S. citizens,” and that § 1373 doesn’t override the privacy protections on Social Security records. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, agreed. She argued that the law requires DHS to answer states’ questions but doesn’t give the Social Security Administration permission to share confidential records. Her conclusion: “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.”

1. How many states run individual checks before the election, and what they do with the results. Using SAVE is voluntary. Maine’s secretary of state, Democrat Shenna Bellows, has already said the ruling changes nothing in her state.

2. The D.C. Circuit’s ruling on the merits. The pause lasts until that appeal, and any petition to the Supreme Court, is decided. The order has already shown which way a majority is leaning.

3. What states do after November 3. Once the 90-day window closes, bulk matches can drive routine voter-roll cleanups again, and the fight over accuracy moves from the courts to county election offices.