Trump petitions Supreme Court to restore SAVE system for voter roll reviews

President Donald Trump filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Tuesday seeking to overturn a lower-court order that halted the use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program in voter-roll audits. The injunction was issued after a district judge found that the administration’s expansion of SAVE violated privacy laws.

SAVE, which was originally designed for individualized citizenship checks, was broadened to allow states to upload entire voter lists and to incorporate additional data sources such as Social Security records. Critics say the expanded system has produced inaccurate matches that could wrongly remove eligible voters, citing Texas’s experience where citizens were mistakenly purged.

"The indefensible ruling by the lower court threatens the integrity of upcoming elections," U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the filing.

"The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote," Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said in her June decision.

The Justice Department argued that any errors in removals are the responsibility of state election officials, not the federal government, and emphasized that states must follow registration laws when acting on SAVE findings. The administration has also linked access to DHS anti-terrorism grants to a state’s use of SAVE and highlighted the system in a recent speech, claiming it had identified thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls, though some states have disputed those numbers.

The Supreme Court is also being asked to reinstate new U.S. Postal Service rules for mail voting that the administration proposed for the upcoming midterm elections. A few states, such as Florida, continue to use SAVE pending separate litigation.