DHS voting database will help exclude any illegal voters

The Supreme Court just gave the Trump administration another 2026 election tool, and the track record of that tool is already sitting inside state voter files.

On September 25, the Supreme Court lifted the lower-court restrictions on DHS’s revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database. The system can now again be used by states to check voters against federal citizenship records while the lawsuit over the database continues.

The part getting less attention is what happened when states used it the first time.

Texas uploaded its entire voter registration list, more than 18 million names, into SAVE.

The system returned 2,724 potential noncitizens.

Then county election officials started checking the names.

And they found U.S. citizens.

In Travis County, SAVE flagged 97 voters. County officials later confirmed that at least 11 already had citizenship documentation on file with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Denton County had 84 people flagged. Officials were able to resolve 26 cases, and 12 were U.S. citizens.

In Potter County, officials checked nine people against DPS records and found that three already had proof of citizenship.

In neighboring Randall County, officials found that one out of every five people on their SAVE list had a U.S. passport or other citizenship documentation in the state’s own records.

The problem got large enough that Texas eventually began checking the federal list against its own Department of Public Safety records.

Christina Adkins, the Texas elections division director, told county officials that the state had initially assumed there would not be much difference between the federal SAVE information and DPS records.

There were discrepancies.

Her explanation was blunt: the databases could contain outdated citizenship information, a person could have become naturalized after the federal record was created, or there could be clerical errors.

Texas was not the only place where the system produced bad matches.

In Boone County, Missouri, SAVE initially flagged 74 people as potential noncitizens.

More than half turned out to be citizens.

One of the people on the list had registered to vote at his naturalization ceremony, with a county election employee helping him complete the registration.

Missouri’s problem went beyond bad paperwork.

State officials acted on SAVE results before fully verifying them. Some voters were temporarily made unable to vote while their citizenship was being checked.

County election officials then started discovering that some of the people the federal system had identified as noncitizens were citizens.

DHS itself has had to correct information supplied to at least five states after SAVE produced incorrect citizenship determinations.

In one Missouri example, the number of potential noncitizens in seven of the state’s largest counties initially exceeded 1,200. After DHS corrected its information, one county’s list fell from 691 people to 133.

Boone County’s list dropped from 74 to 33.

That is not a theoretical problem with a future system.

Those were names sitting on actual voter rolls.

And the errors were concentrated in a predictable place: people who were born outside the United States but later became American citizens.

The revamped SAVE system relies heavily on Social Security Administration information. DHS and SSA connected SAVE to the SSA’s NUMIDENT database, which contains names, dates and places of birth, Social Security numbers, citizenship indicators and other information.

The system can use full or partial Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches.

But a Social Security record can predate someone’s naturalization by years.

So someone can have a perfectly legitimate Social Security number issued while they were a noncitizen, later become an American citizen, and still encounter an outdated federal citizenship record when the databases are matched.

That is exactly the type of voter who showed up in the real-world testing.

Sofia Minotti, who was born in Argentina and later became a U.S. citizen, was one of 84 people flagged in Denton County.

She had already become a citizen years earlier.

She still ended up having to prove it.

Of the Denton County cases that officials were able to resolve, at least 14% were citizens. The county official who spoke to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune said the actual error rate could be higher because some people who received notices might not respond before the deadline.

There were legitimate hits, too.

Texas election officials found people whose voter-registration forms said they were not citizens but who had nevertheless been registered.

Some voters had apparently misunderstood eligibility questions when dealing with driver’s licenses.

The issue is therefore not that SAVE produces nothing useful.

The issue is what happens after the database produces a name.

The federal number is a lead.

It is not itself proof that somebody illegally voted.

Across at least seven states that publicly reported their results, roughly 35 million registered voters were checked through SAVE. About 4,200 were identified as potential noncitizens.

That works out to roughly 0.01% of the registrations searched.

And some of those 4,200 people were later determined to be citizens.

Yet the administration has continued expanding the system.

In March 2025, Trump’s executive order directed DHS to build systems allowing state and local governments to verify the citizenship of registered voters and people applying to register.

DHS then connected SAVE to Social Security data.

USCIS official David Jennings later said the new system was tested and deployed to users in two weeks.

By September, Texas had uploaded its entire 18-million-person voter list, while Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming had also put voter information into SAVE.

Then the courts shut the expanded system down.

A federal judge ruled that the revamped SAVE system violated federal law, including privacy protections. The D.C. Circuit left the restrictions in place.

On September 25, the Supreme Court stepped in.

The unsigned majority order said the federal government could resume using the program while the case proceeds. Three justices dissented.

The Supreme Court’s own opinion describes the new system plainly: states can submit bulk queries using full or partial Social Security numbers, and an inconclusive result can lead a state to demand proof of citizenship from the voter. If the voter fails to provide it on time, the state may remove the person from the rolls.

There is also a clock running.

The ruling came 39 days before the November 3 midterm election.

Federal law generally prevents states from conducting systematic voter-list maintenance during the final 90 days before a federal election. That means the Supreme Court’s decision does not simply give states a free hand to purge millions of names before Novembe