The Supreme Court Revived a Voter Database. In Nevada, Its Highest-Confidence Matches Were All Citizens.

The Supreme Court cleared the Department of Homeland Security on September 25 to resume checking state voter rolls against an expanded citizenship database, over a dissent warning the tool has already flagged citizens as noncitizens. The 6-3 order in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters lifted a district court injunction from June and let DHS, along with any state that opts in, run voters through the modified SAVE system again.

The window is specific. It covers the 39 days left before the November 3 midterms, the same stretch when a separate federal law otherwise bars states from systematically purging voter rolls.

SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, is a decades-old federal tool built to check immigration status for benefits eligibility. An executive order President Trump signed in late March directed DHS to expand it: add Social Security number matching, fold in records for U.S.-born citizens, and let states run large batches of voter names against it at once. A federal judge in Washington blocked that expanded version in June, ruling it likely violated federal privacy law by sharing Americans' personal data without proper authorization.

What happened the one time this got tested

Nevada is the state where DHS's noncitizen-voter claims have gone furthest through an outside check. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in July that DHS had identified as many as 15,903 potential noncitizens on Nevada's voter rolls, part of a broader administration claim of more than 270,000 noncitizens on rolls across Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. By August, DHS told the state it had manually reviewed a subset of that list and was confident 185 of those names belonged to noncitizens. The agency said the rest, more than 14,000 names plus another 6,000 case numbers it called higher-confidence but still unreviewed, needed further work.

Nevada asked DHS for the names, birth dates and addresses behind the 185 matches so the state could check them against its own voter file. Kimberley Vogt, the fraud division chief at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, declined, telling Nevada the agency would prefer to limit its information sharing to just the voter ID numbers from the state's own public list. Nevada ran the checks anyway with what it had. Every one of the 185 came back as a citizen.

"As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens," Nevada Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote to DHS in a letter obtained by the New York Times. "You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise."

“Our records do not support DHS's claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that. DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”

Why DHS says that doesn't settle it

DHS disputes Nevada's framing. The agency told reporters the 185 names were only a partial batch that had gone through manual review, not its final position, and noted it never handed Nevada the underlying data for the original 15,903, only voter case numbers without names attached. Ott has a mechanical explanation for why matching by number alone falls apart: when Nevada consolidated separate county voter systems into one statewide database, a numeric ID once tied to one county's voter could later be reassigned, under the new system, to an entirely different person. Without a name or birth date to check against, Nevada says it cannot verify who DHS actually matched.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the three dissenting justices, argued the majority weighed only one side of the ledger. She pointed to the district court's finding of "the risk that States might cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or force such persons to provide proof of citizenship before voting." The administration told the Court the opposite risk, keeping the tool offline, was the one that mattered: the lower court's order, the unsigned majority opinion said, "inhibits the Federal Government's efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections."

Nothing in Friday's order requires DHS to fix the identification problems Nevada found, or to substantiate the roughly 14,000 outstanding Nevada names and the wider 270,000-person, four-state figure, before midterm voting begins. What changes now is narrower than the headline claims on either side suggest. DHS and the states that want to use SAVE no longer have to wait for the privacy lawsuit to finish, or for that proof, before running the checks again.