Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks

My human summarization of the decision:

- SAVE was a database established in 1986 to determine if immigrants were eligible for federal benefits

- Starting in 2005, some states used it to check their voter registrations

- By executive order, the administration merged it with the SSN database to make bulk searches easier

- Organizations sued, and a lower court said the administration had to hold off on rolling out the changes while the lawsuit was pending. The Supreme Court overruled the stay, saying the lawsuit had not proved enough merit to stop the policy while the lawsuits proceed.

- It is still up to states whether they use SAVE or not. If someone shows up in the SAVE database, the state may ask them to provide proof of citizenship.

The concern here from the dissent is that states are going to purge their voter registrations while awaiting the ruling. But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits.

Update: Per NPR, the SAVE database covers 65 million voters in 26 states, of which 28,635 have been flagged as "potential noncitizens". https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/25/the-supreme-court-rev...

In Texas, using this dataset, they were only able to bring forward 117 cases of fraudulent voting.

Who is the editor on this article? Why would they expect the reader to know what the SAVE database is and what its original purpose was for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...

> Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.

The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database

> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)

It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.

https://apnews.com/article/save-database-noncitizen-voters-t...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-save-system...

Wow I haven’t heard of the SAVE database at all before today, despite knowing about e-verify and SEVIS and similar programs. Reading Wikipedia there’s also VIS and PCQS, two more systems I haven’t heard of. It seems that the country’s distaste for a national ID not only forces each state to issue IDs but also the federal government to create a patchwork of slightly different ID programs.

My prediction is that republican-led states are going to implement this for voting and throw their state elections into chaos, while states that don't implement do just fine.

I was wondering what this was.

SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...

The DHS SAVE which is the same backend data source used by CMS HUB Verify Lawful Presense (VLP) has been used by State systems (i.e. State Medicare/Medicaid Eligibility Systems) for verifying residency status of individuals. This isn't really new.

In my life I have known dozens (maybe hundreds?) of so-called illegal aliens. They all tell the same story: they came to the US to earn money to support their families. I have NEVER heard someone tell me they came to the US to vote, or they intend to vote, or they even know what voting is. So, this idea that millions of illegals are voting just doesn't align with my reality, and honestly, I don't think it aligns with any reality.

The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.

Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements

Sounds like something Philip K Dick came up with.

Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?

The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.

An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.

hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1

remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all

if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028

of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override

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