President Donald Trump wants to let states use a federal database that includes voters’ personal information to check for noncitizens on voter rolls.
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The Trump administration can use a wide-ranging government database that includes Social Security information to help state officials identify noncitizens on their voter lists, the Supreme Court said on Friday.
The emergency ruling means the database will be in use for November’s midterm elections. But the fight over the procedure’s legality will continue in the lower courts.
In an unsigned opinion, the majority said the claims made by the voters who challenged the database’s use “likely lack merit.” The court added that, under laws covering the data, “the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.”
The court’s three liberals dissented.
“The Court also focuses only on the harms the Government will purportedly suffer absent a stay, disregarding the harms that the modified … system has caused, and will likely continue to cause, to lawful voters,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the liberals in dissent. “The Court thus misuses its equitable powers.”
The case is one of a flurry of election-related cases the high court has resolved less than two months before the critical Nov. 3 midterms.
In the most high-profile case, the justices blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to impose sweeping new restrictions on mail-in ballots, a major blow to a president who has often complained without evidence that mail-in voting is rife with fraud. Democratic and Republican states, along with an array of voting groups, warned that the restrictions would cause chaos by disenfranchising voters and disrupting ballot delivery across the country.
Also in recent weeks, the justices blocked a congressional map from taking effect in Missouri that probably would have helped the GOP gain an extra seat in the House. And they said political parties can get discounted TV ad rates when they buy in coordination with candidates, giving a boost to Republicans, whose party committees have far more money to spend in the midterms than those linked to Democrats.
The high court’s latest decision now joins that mix of 11th-hour rulings.
In a March 2025 executive order, President Donald Trump ordered the creation of a federal database containing Social Security data and information on natural-born citizens that state election officials would be able to use in broad searches to verify their voter rolls.
It expanded an existing database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE).
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State and local officials have used the SAVE system to verify a person’s citizenship before handing out licenses and benefits, and also sometimes to verify voter eligibility. But the system was limited, without information on natural-born citizens or Social Security data.
The plaintiffs, immigrants who have obtained U.S. citizenship, challenged the administration’s creation of the enhanced database, saying that it exceeded what Congress had authorized and that the government does not have the ability to provide “accurate, real-time” verification of someone’s citizenship.
The government acknowledged internally that the database could misidentify eligible voters as noncitizens and has an error rate of as high as 81 percent in some localities, the plaintiffs wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court.
“The government has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” the groups wrote.
In June, a federal judge in D.C. blocked use of the database, writing that the administration “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.” The federal appeals court in D.C. declined to pause the ruling, prompting the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court this month.
The administration argued that the database was an effective tool to verify the eligibility of registered voters and benefits applicants under various state and federal programs. “The district court has issued an indefensible order that threatens the integrity of upcoming elections,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a filing with the court.
The state of Texas, which the courts allowed to intervene as a defendant in the case, argued in a filing the database was “transformational” and urged the Supreme Court to clear its use.
“The updates, now disabled following the district court’s order, allowed Texas to more efficiently, promptly, and economically ensure the accuracy of its voter rolls,” Texas wrote.
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This is a developing story. It will be updated.
