alt Hacker NewsMy human summarization of the decision:
- 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.
Replies
Yea but those mass lawsuits won't happen or matter until after midterms at this point, so even if they did illegal stuff in the end the votes will have been suppressed successfully. In a war, if you do a war crime, the dead are still dead even if the person who committed the war crime is accountable later. In politics, if they do a criminal act like this, they win an election and never have to account for their actions, because their side won and won't call them to account.
As I understand it, one of the main disenfranchisement tactics is to challenge ballots already cast. It's potentially very effective because the voter must see that their vote was challenged and then proactively contest it.
Does the decision make this easier?
Every "concern" raised by the Trump administration is cover for voter disenfranchisement. Period.
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.
> 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
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.