The Trump administration had worked with some states to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) tool, originally meant to confirm benefits eligibility, to check for noncitizens on voter rolls. A federal district court halted it in June, in a decision largely about data privacy, before the Supreme Court intervened in late-September:
[T]he Supreme Court majority found that a 1996 law explicitly allows DHS to obtain information on citizenship and immigration from other federal agencies. The federal government also has “an obligation to respond” to states seeking to verify citizenship.
“The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the majority wrote in the unsigned order.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. The database has long been seen to fall under federal privacy laws, she wrote, and there are real risks that legitimate voter registrations could be mistakenly revoked.
“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote.
Contributor Stephen Richer has written about the good and the bad of SAVE as a voter verification tool. The “good” boils down to it being one of multiple resources that are checked against each other, when used responsibly. The “bad” is that . . . it hasn’t always been used so responsibly. When consulted by itself, with no other data sources, it has resulted in the wrongful removal of many voters.
Relevant to the November elections, the Supreme Court’s decision was issued well inside the federal 90-day window during which states are prohibited from removing registered voters as part of “list maintenance.” That means attempted bulk removals based on the use of SAVE is likely to be a non-issue before Election Day. Afterward, the debate about its legality will resume.