By 6-3, the Supreme Court paused a lower-court order blocking the Trump administration’s expanded SAVE database, letting states use it for now to check voter rolls for potential noncitizens. The majority said it was likely to reverse the ruling.
The unsigned emergency order stayed a June ruling by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s overhauled Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system after finding it violated federal privacy laws. The majority said voting-rights groups’ claims about the database’s legality likely lack merit. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Voting-rights groups challenging the system say it can provide states with inaccurate citizenship data; they said some members’ voter registrations were wrongly canceled. The system is part of the administration’s search for evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in federal elections, though such voting has been shown to be very rare and claims of widespread voting have largely been debunked.
