Supreme Court Greenlights Flawed DHS Voter-List Tool, But Quiet Period Offers Temporary Protection
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The Supreme Court has allowed states to use the Department of Homeland Security's controversial SAVE system to scrutinize voter rolls, but a 90-day quiet period blocks mass purges before the November elections, offering a crucial—if temporary—safeguard against voter suppression.
On September 25, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, sided with conservative interests by permitting states to access the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database—an error-prone system containing citizenship data—to verify individual voter registrations. This ruling comes during the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day quiet period, a critical protection that prevents mass voter-list maintenance and purges in the lead-up to federal elections.
Due to this quiet period, election officials are restricted to case-by-case checks, which limits the immediate threat to voters in the November midterms. The Court’s unsigned opinion even acknowledged that the timing “limits the potential impact” of its own ruling. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the liberal justices, issued a stark warning: even a handful of wrongful removals could inflict more harm than any supposed benefit.
Voting rights experts emphasized that the ruling is unlikely to disrupt this year’s voting process. “This decision will not have any significant impact on the 2026 election, as systematic voter list maintenance is prohibited within 90 days of a federal election, which the Supreme Court explicitly confirmed,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
However, the threat looms for the future: after the election, states will regain the ability to conduct sweeping voter-list purges. The Supreme Court is set to hear further arguments in December on the scope of the quiet-period rule, which could open the door to even more aggressive voter suppression efforts.
In a related case, a federal judge blocked a Trump-era requirement that states use SAVE to qualify for FEMA grants, ruling that the agency had overstepped its authority. Critics have long argued that SAVE is fundamentally flawed, relying on outdated and inaccurate data that can misidentify eligible voters, leading to disenfranchisement and privacy risks. “SAVE was never designed to verify citizenship: it relies on outdated and inaccurate data that produces false matches, risks disenfranchising eligible voters, and exposes sensitive personal information to misuse and bad actors,” said Tim Harper of the Center for Democracy & Technology.
Federal officials, meanwhile, continue to defend SAVE as a voluntary tool to maintain voter rolls—ignoring the real dangers it poses. “It’s remarkable that we had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we can use government data to stop noncitizens from voting illegally. American elections are for Americans,” said James Percival, general counsel for Homeland Security, echoing nativist rhetoric.
The supposed problem of non-citizen voting is virtually nonexistent. The 2020 Census found only about 24,000 instances out of 160 million votes (0.015%), and earlier studies of the 2016 election found even fewer. Despite DHS claims of hundreds of thousands of potential non-citizen registrations, state-level verification has repeatedly shown these lists to be riddled with errors, with many so-called non-citizens later confirmed as citizens.