The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to allow it to use its overhauled citizenship verification system ahead of the midterm elections.
In an application, the Department of Homeland Security argues that a lower court ruling that blocked the use of Social Security numbers and other information in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections.”
DHS revamped the system after President Donald Trump’s executive order in March 2025 aimed at rooting out potential noncitizen voters, although there is no evidence of large numbers of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections.
In the filing, DHS said the system has verified the citizenship of more than 65 million voters across 26 states while flagging 28,635 potential non-citizens on state voter lists. “The district court’s order, however, makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections,” the application states.
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The SAVE system was created to verify the immigration status of non-citizens and naturalized U.S. citizens applying for government benefits.
Under the Trump administration, DHS has been overhauling the system to use it for voter verification, connecting additional government data to the system, including data from the Social Security Administration, and expanding its reach to also cover U.S. citizens.
That has sparked both privacy concerns and fears that the system could disenfranchise eligible voters; in Utah and Texas, some of those flagged by the system were later verified to be U.S. citizens.
States are charged with election administration under the Constitution and already have systems in place to maintain their voter rolls.
Voting and privacy groups have sued over the addition of Social Security numbers to the database — leading to the ruling from June that the Trump administration filing calls “an indefensible order that threatens the integrity of upcoming elections.”
DHS contends a district court judge got it wrong when she found the voting- and privacy-rights groups have a legal right to file the lawsuit and that the new SAVE system violates privacy law.
Last week, a federal appeals court declined to allow the federal government to revive the database.
The Trump administration says that the block on the SAVE system will “irreparably harm the federal government, the States, and the public by depriving the government of an effective tool to verify the eligibility of registered voters and benefits applicants under various state and federal programs.”
The old SAVE system, the government says, is “an older, slower, more cumbersome, and less capable process” that does not have certain identifying information and requires users to search one name at a time.
Critics, meanwhile, say that some of the data the new SAVE system relies on to verify citizens is not fit for purpose.
“Social Security numbers are not verification of citizenship,” Tina Waddell, former general counsel at SSA who left the agency last year, told NOTUS previously. The Social Security Administration itself has said that its data isn’t a definitive record of U.S. citizens.
The Trump administration’s efforts to revamp the SAVE system and use it to comb through voter rolls has been at the center of tangled legal proceedings.
The Supreme Court has ordered a response from the voting groups that challenged the database by Sept. 15..
The SAVE system is not the only front in the Trump administration’s effort to verify voter rolls and change voting in the midterms, including a challenge to a U.S. Postal Service rule over mail-in ballots.
The administration also has been attempting to obtain copies of states’ voter rolls, so far with no success.
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