Supreme Court Allows Temporary Use of SAVE to Check Voter Rolls Before Midterms
The U.S. Supreme Court on September 25, 2026, granted an emergency request allowing the Trump administration to use the SAVE system to check state voter rolls before the November midterm election. Al Jazeera
The order lets the Department of Homeland Security use SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a federal database first built to check eligibility for benefits) to verify whether people on state rolls are eligible to vote. It is interim relief in DHS v. League of Women Voters, docket No. 26A308. It applies only until the Court issues a final ruling on the merits.
The vote was 6-3. The three liberal justices dissented, saying the majority had disregarded harms to lawful voters. The majority gave no full opinion, which is normal for an emergency order.
The case reached the justices quickly. A district judge had blocked the administration from using the revamped database for voter checks. The administration then asked the Supreme Court to stay, or pause, that order. Reuters A federal appeals court had upheld the ban on using citizenship data for voter checks shortly before the application reached the justices. Reuters
SAVE was revamped under the Trump administration in 2025. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been updating its voter-verification tools to allow bulk uploads, so states can submit many names at once instead of one by one. States made about 60 million voter-verification queries to SAVE from January 1, 2025, to April 1, 2026, according to the government's stay application. SCOTUS Docket A separate filing described more than one million status checks per day. Since April 2025, DHS has said SAVE flagged more than 24,000 cases as potential non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls. DHS
Use of SAVE is voluntary. States are not required to use it, and several Republican-led states have opted in. The administration's wider elections directive, Executive Order 14399, is titled "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections."
The midterm election is November 3 and will decide control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Existing law bars most states from systematically removing voters from rolls within 90 days of an election. Earlier in September 2026, the Court rejected a separate Trump request to restrict mail ballot procedures before the midterms.
Accuracy is disputed. An election official in Travis County, Texas, found that up to 25 percent of people flagged as non-citizens by SAVE there were in fact U.S. citizens. That finding is central to the challenge from the League of Women Voters and to the dissent's warning about mistaken removal.
The broader context here is a clash common in election administration. One risk is that ineligible names stay on the rolls. The other risk is that eligible voters are flagged, questioned, or removed because of data errors. Interim orders do not settle which risk is larger. They assign that risk for the period before full briefing and argument.
Looking at what this means for election officials, the order keeps a patchwork in place. States that want SAVE access can keep making queries and bulk uploads while the case continues. States that do not trust its match rates can decline it. The 90-day federal limit on systematic removals will now do much of the practical work of deciding what verification can still lead to removal, and what must wait until after November 3.
