WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday permitted the Trump administration to use an expanded federal database containing citizenship information, as the president encourages states to purge people from voter rolls.
The justices, divided 6-3 on ideological lines with conservatives in the majority, granted an emergency request filed by the government after lower courts ruled that the Trump administration’s changes to the database were likely unlawful.
Critics have said the data is unreliable and could lead to U.S. citizens being kicked off the voter rolls.
But the court noted in its unsigned ruling that the National Voter Registration Act bars the broad purging of voter rolls in the weeks leading up to an election, which “limits the potential impact” of the decision this year. States can still make individualized queries about voters.
On the broader legal questions raised in the case, the court said that federal law requires the government to respond to requests from states for information about citizenship.
The lower court injunction “prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the court said.
In dissent, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the government had not done enough to show that the lower court ruling needed to be blocked.
In her view, “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,” she added.
Various groups challenging the plan, led by the League of Women Voters, have argued that it violates several laws, including the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act.
The Supreme Court decision “puts millions of Americans at risk for being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database,” the groups said in a statement.
Conservative who have backed the administration’s efforts to tighten voting laws, welcomed the decision.
The ruling “just makes it easier for states to get federal citizenship data to help them clean up voter rolls,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, said in a statement.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, was set up by Congress in 1986 so that government agencies could quickly determine someone’s immigration status when they applied for benefits like Social Security.
The Trump administration expanded SAVE after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 that required agencies to take steps to better ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in elections.
The government expanded the database by adding information from the Social Security Administration, which enabled searches using Social Security numbers and allowed officials to do bulk searches.
After states started putting their voter rolls through the newly expanded system, some local officials noticed mistakes; many of the flagged registrants were newly naturalized citizens, according to reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Texas was one of the first states to put its full voter rolls — more than 18 million registrations — through the SAVE database last year. Just three people have been charged with voting illegally as a noncitizen.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration plan, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reaching the same conclusion.
In court papers, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said that the district court’s ruling “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections” by preventing the government from responding to state requests to verify the citizenship of potential voters.
Opponents argue the expanded database could force bureaucratic obligations on newly naturalized citizens who are asked to prove their citizenship after being flagged by the system.
Noncitizen voting is extremely rare. All states are required to conduct voter roll list maintenance under federal law, and states already have processes to identify any noncitizens who do accidentally make it onto the voter rolls.
