hckrnws
Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks
(cyberscoop.com)
76
98
by speckx
by speckx
- SAVE was a database established in 1986 to determine if immigrants were eligible for federal benefits
- Starting in 2005, some states used it to check their voter registrations
- By executive order, the administration merged it with the SSN database to make bulk searches easier
- Organizations sued, and a lower court said the administration had to hold off on rolling out the changes while the lawsuit was pending. The Supreme Court overruled the stay, saying the lawsuit had not proved enough merit to stop the policy while the lawsuits proceed.
- It is still up to states whether they use SAVE or not. If someone shows up in the SAVE database, the state may ask them to provide proof of citizenship.
The concern here from the dissent is that states are going to purge their voter registrations while awaiting the ruling. But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits.
Update: Per NPR, the SAVE database covers 65 million voters in 26 states, of which 28,635 have been flagged as "potential noncitizens". https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/25/the-supreme-court-rev...
In Texas, using this dataset, they were only able to bring forward 117 cases of fraudulent voting.
Except we've seen this before. States purge roles, judge orders them to restore it, oopsie we can't do that before an election, judge permits it to continue until after the election. We've seen this with voter roll purges, gerrymandering, etc. Surprisingly it only seems like one party does this, the party that supposedly supports democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
> Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.
The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database
> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
https://apnews.com/article/save-database-noncitizen-voters-t...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-save-system...
The main issue is not distaste per se, though there are bi-partisan factions that oppose a national ID.
The Supreme Court has consistently asserted that a mandatory Federal ID is unconstitutional because that is a power reserved for the individual States. It is the same reason everyone has a Social Security card but they are explicitly not to be used as an ID. Every time Congress has tried to constructively invent a loophole to work around this prohibition the Supreme Court disallowed it.
The US government can issue IDs. Many people have multiple Federal IDs. The US government just can't make everyone have one or use them. It is what it is.
SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. -- Milton Friedman
The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.
Sounds like something Philip K Dick came up with.
The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.
An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.
remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all
if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028
of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override
[dead]
[dead]
Compare the respective numbers of Democratic and Republican presidents in your lifetime who attained the office while losing the popular vote.
I'm convinced that even if there were large scale concerns about the legitimacy elections in the USA, they would quitely be puy to rest because God forbid we ever reckon with the fact yhat the USA might not be a perfect democracy, cant taint the image.
Anyone looking to tamper with elections now knows they can just equivalate anyone who challenges them with Jan 6ers types.
Tbf, democracy in this country is fundamentally broken when you have 4 companies that control the media and have a ton of control over how people see the world.
Does the decision make this easier?
Realistically, the rate of fraud nationwide is actually really low and this database would just a waste of time for the states that pursue it. But by holding it off the courts would be doing more to cover the administration (by giving them a plausible excuse) than letting it proceed.
It reminds me of those police drug busts where they take a picture of all the drugs and it's just like a couple small bags, but they'll run the press release like "hundreds of lives saved!"
Acting like there are going to be millions of voters purged serves both party messages right now.
Even if you know with high certainty that a million ballots are fraudulent it is effectively impossible to challenge them because the judicial capacity required to do so doesn't remotely exist. There are adversarial scenarios where someone dumps vast numbers of fraudulent ballots and those ballots cannot be contested.
State legislatures have historically been empowered to vote in place of the people if the vote becomes infeasible or unreliable. People voting in Federal elections is largely a 20th century invention; the old methods are still available.
Voter fraud is incredibly rare, but I have a gut feeling that electoral fraud has happened and will continue to get worse, courtesy of the same administration.
It must be remembered that every accusation from them is a confession.
For the acolytes that down vote me, at least make your case on where and why I am wrong. My comment is as a citizen, not as a partisan.
>It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
How's the database used? From what I can tell it's a database of non-citizens that claimed benefits, so using it as a blacklist against voter rolls seems... fine? Even if the original premise of "there's hoards illegal immigrants voting" is questionable.
Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote. So even if they use SAVE to "flag" potential voters, they are still going to have to provide people a way to provide proof of citizenship.
Yes they can. States can deny citizens the right to vote for "participation in rebellion, or other crime", as per the 14th Amendment and felons are often denied the right to vote. They can't do so on the basis of "race, color or former servitude" (15th Amendment) and probably not any other protected class reason (sex, religion, ethnicity) but that implicitly gives states the right to do so for any other reason.
You sure?
Citizens currently serving a prison term for the conviction of a felony cannot vote.
Citizens found mentally incompetent by a court cannot vote.
What's "so-called illegal aliens" mean in this context? Are they illegal aliens or are they not? Where does the ambiguity of legality come from?
The administration could have decided to revoke their status. A judge could have put a stay in place because deportation would mean returning them to a dangerous situation. See the Abrego Garcia case. Some don't even know their status since their parents brought them here at a young age.
So you see it's not as simple as branding everyone an "illegal alien". That's political propaganda at work.
What the Right has done is take the fact that there are some communities (in liberal areas) that have allowed non-citizens to vote in community issues, which is not entirely unreasonable. They then mash up that "fact" and trumpet it as an attack on our system by "illegals".
Their dishonesty knows no bounds.
In this case, I think they are not completely unreasonable. This specific move is one of the things the executive branch has been allowed to do, by previous legislators who gave it this power.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of reason to believe SCOTUS is political. I think the simplest one: the conservative justices lied and/or told half-truths about their views on Roe v Wade. Under oath. The ones who lied are liars. The ones who dodged the question are politicians.
It's also worth pointing out that there is a gulf of difference between how a court interprets law and the constitution, and how a court interprets a previous "Precedent". Courts have a lot of power to throw out or reverse previous precedent, but much less permanent power to change interpretation of the laws themselves.
> Courts have a lot of power to throw out or reverse previous precedent
Yes, we've seen the death of stare decisis.
> less permanent power to change interpretation of the laws themselves.
They have to work harder to do it but this court has not been shy about reinterpeting everything through the Calvinball (originalism) lens.
Which is the unconstitutional part?
> Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections
In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.
The federal government is not forcing states to use the SAVE database. They are simply not interfering with states that want to use it to "make this determination".
So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.
Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.
The Supreme Court didn't quite rule that this was constitutional, I suppose, only that no court is allowed to consider the question.
26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.
AFAIK it's never been argued in court, it's just what someone in the executive branch in the late '70s decided should happen, and before that in the event of failure to pass a budget it was assumed that spending should continue as-is, until another budget is passed, more-or-less. It's not even clear it'd be illegal if he just went on like nothing had happened.
They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
1. Source?
2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?
also if they weren't citizens they would have been deported by now
that's how we know none of the claims are true
I mean think about what's gone down the past year, citizens grabbed and disappeared by ICE for weeks, people deported to third countries they've never been to and have US travel warning for extreme danger
you think a single voting fraud wouldn't be on FOX every single night and the front page of whitehouse .gov?
it's all noise
and the irony is it's the 50% of citizen latino voters that put them in power in the first place, it's why the total panic now to scare them off from the polls when they change their minds
Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...
This something like an order of magnitude lower than the error margin.
Al Franken won a senate seat by 312 votes in 2008
A Maine House seat was won by 1 vote in 2024
1 illegal vote is too many.
So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.
Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...
But I think another perspective is a more dangerous effort to chip away at state responsibility for the process and procedures of voting. Once this is owned or easily influenced by a national institution then a single-party state disguised as a republic becomes far simpler to implement.
The danger here being that our system has relied on decentralized states handling these tasks and thus has not created the guardrails necessary (if ever they could survive a unitary executive theory) to ensure fairness.
https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trum...
Why do we pursue murderers? There are not that many.
Either the law matters or it does not. Pick your own world to live in, but be consistent.
Okay.
See, there are always two kinds of errors. In the case of voting, one kind is where you let someone vote who shouldn't, and the other is where you don't let someone vote who should. And when you try to decrease one, you increase the other, because you don't have a perfect system.
So, how much suppression of legitimate voters should we accept in order to decrease voter fraud? I think the answer should be "no more voters should be suppressed than there are fraudulent votes cast, and preferably fewer".
Well, how many fraudulent votes are cast? There is little evidence that it's a large problem. In the absence of such evidence, I do not thing that there should be large changes to try to eliminate the fraudulent votes that exist, because they are likely to cause more problems the other direction.
Note well: I do not approve of fraudulent votes. But even more I disapprove of creating a large problem to fix a small one.
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
Link the comparison please. I already know what the numbers are
Of course the entitlements are useful spending - these are things people need and benefit from. Had these dollars not been spent by the US government, they would have been spent directly by the taxpayers for the same goods and services. While some money may have been saved if this spending were private, it probably wouldn't change the total economic impact by much.
On the other hand we have nothing to show for the $18 trillion burned on wars that went horrifically. If we'd put that money into useful investments such that it paid interest and stopped our defense spending, we would be running a $300 billion per year surplus right now with no cuts to any other government services, to say nothing of the potential economic advantages if the wars had just never happened.
And don't get me started on the $10 trillion lost to the Bush tax cuts and their extensions.
Convenient to exclude SS for ... no reason other than it makes your numbers look better because its a vast majority of entitlement spending so it makes your argument look bad.
May I ask you provide numbers including all entitlement spending, which includes SS?
This is what I meant by knowing what the numbers are.
[dead]
Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-charges-16...
except there now have been hundreds if not thousands of those murders
the gun argument against regulation is "it's a right and it would bother too many legit rights"
so same energy, "voting is a right and would bother too many legit rights"
there you go
let me know when guns are harder to get than voting
and when child murders by gun are fewer than "illegal votes"
then we can talk
DOJ just ordered teenagers can buy handguns, soon by US mail, good luck with that
do you understand how many billions are being spent on this voter blocking effort?
how many dollars per voter do you want to spend? it's currently hundreds per voter
so find each accidental "illegal vote" is literally costing MILLIONS to find
and there is NOTHING stopping an audit AFTER a close election and reversing the result in courts
but can't undo the child murder, ever
Every political party and their allies say their opponents can't be allowed to win, at least the last few election cycles. It's a tired trope that "Trump is going to do xyz thing to stay in power." It's a hysteria cycle, and none of it ever comes true.
Basically what every election fraud expert has been saying. There's always a dozen or so cases per year and the occasional glitch that gets caught.
that's the best Trump can muster to justify a "stolen election"?
It does hold government debt, but that's not really useful and puts it in a totally different category from "spending that contributes to the budget deficit".