Only American citizens can vote in federal elections. That’s the law. On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed that states should be allowed to use the best tool available to make sure it’s followed.
In a 6-3 order on September 25, the justices let the Trump administration keep running an expanded version of a federal citizenship database, known as SAVE. States can use it to check whether the people on their voter rolls are actually citizens. The ruling comes with the midterm elections just weeks away.
What SAVE is
SAVE stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. It was created in 1986 to help government agencies check the immigration or citizenship status of people applying for public benefits. States have used it for voter checks for years.
The Trump administration upgraded it. According to SCOTUSblog, the new version includes records of U.S.-born citizens, can use Social Security numbers, and can run many searches at the same time. In plain terms, election officials can check many names against federal records at once.
How the case got here
The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued. In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., blocked the expanded system. She ruled it violated privacy law, the Social Security Act, and rules on how agencies make policy.
The Supreme Court has now put her order on hold while the case continues.
The unsigned majority opinion was blunt. It said the federal government “has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” as quoted by CBS News. It added that the lower court’s order blocked the government from using “the program it believes is best suited to the task.”
According to CBS, the majority also said the challengers’ claims “likely lack merit.” That’s a strong signal of where the Court may land if the case returns.
The dissent
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. She argued that “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences” when it is blocked from acting, as quoted by ABC News.
The groups that sued say they aren’t done. “This case is not over,” they said in a statement reported by the Deseret News.
What supporters are saying
The Department of Homeland Security called the ruling a win. “American elections are for Americans,” said DHS general counsel James Percival, as quoted by CBS News.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who proposed the SAVE Act to require proof of citizenship to register, was just as pleased. “Excellent news for election security,” he said, according to the Deseret News.
Commentary: Checking isn’t disenfranchising
Justice Jackson called the government’s harm “nonexistent.” That gets it backward.
Every ballot cast by someone who isn’t eligible cancels out the vote of a citizen who is. That’s the harm, and it falls on real voters. Election officials are the ones asking for help here. The federal government holds the records that can answer their questions, and it would be strange to forbid it from sharing them.
Critics point out that audits have found noncitizen voting to be rare, as ABC News noted. Fair enough. But “rare” is not “never,” and the only way to know how rare is to check. We don’t skip bank audits because most tellers are honest.
The privacy concerns deserve a serious answer too. Judge Sooknanan said states were removing citizens from the rolls based on inaccurate information. If that happens, it should be fixed quickly, and any voter flagged by mistake deserves a fast, simple way to prove citizenship. Good systems include an appeal button.
But the answer to an imperfect tool is to improve it, not to force states to fly blind. States run elections. Their officials asked Washington for help confirming who is a citizen, and six justices agreed Washington should give it.
For voters who want confidence in November’s results, that’s welcome news. The legal fight will continue. For now, states can keep checking.