WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday permitted the Trump administration to use an expanded federal database containing citizenship information, as the president encourages states to purge people from voter rolls.The justices, divided 6-3 on ideological lines with conservatives in the majority, granted an emergency request filed by the government after lower courts ruled that the Trump administration’s changes to the database were likely unlawful.Critics have said the data is unreliable and could lead to U.S.citizens being kicked off the voter rolls.But the court noted in its unsigned ruling that the National Voter Registration Act bars the broad purging of voter rolls in the weeks leading up to an election, which “limits the potential impact” of the decision this year.
States can still make individualized queries about voters.Add to GoogleTexas election officials struggle to process backlog of voter registrations01:52On the broader legal questions raised in the case, the court said that federal law requires the government to respond to requests from states for information about citizenship.The lower court injunction “prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the court said.The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, was originally set up by Congress in 1986 so that government agencies could quickly determine someone’s immigration status when they applied for benefits like Social Security.The Trump administration expanded SAVE after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 that required agencies to take steps to better ensure that only U.S.
citizens vote in elections.The government expanded the database by adding information from the Social Security Administration, which enabled searches using Social Security numbers and allowed officials to do bulk searches.In dissent, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the government had not d...