The Supreme Court revives a controversial data system for citizenship checks

The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way, for now, for the Trump administration to resume using an overhauled federal data system to check citizenship on state voter rolls, even as the tool has mistakenly flagged eligible voters as potential noncitizens. The ruling revives use of SAVE, a decades-old Department of Homeland Security database built to verify immigrant eligibility for public benefits, which DHS expanded last year by linking it to Social Security Administration records and enabling bulk searches of voter rolls, according to NPR.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had blocked the expanded system in June, ruling that pooling and sharing such sensitive data breached federal privacy and administrative law and writing that the government had "trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens." After a divided appeals panel refused to pause that ruling, Solicitor General D. John Sauer took the case to the Supreme Court, arguing the block undermined election integrity. His appeal said that since last May, SAVE has checked more than 65 million voters in 26 states, turning up 28,635 who appeared to be noncitizens.

The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center opposed the appeal, saying Congress never authorized a "master database" of citizens and that the government has not disclosed SAVE's error rate. In Texas, running the state's voter rolls through SAVE identified 2,724 people as possibly not citizens; about a fifth were later confirmed to be citizens, and Anthony Nel, a flagged voter, gave a declaration in the case.

Summarized by PolitiKool from NPR’s reporting. Read the full story at NPR →