A federal judge on Monday blocked the use of a revamped federal database central to the Trump administration's efforts to nationalize elections, ruling that it could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls. US District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program aggregated Americans' sensitive personal data in violation of privacy laws.
Court Ruling and Rationale
In her order, Judge Sooknanan stated, "All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens." She noted that Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans' personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created SAVE "knew that the database violates those statutory protections."
The decision is a major legal setback for President Donald Trump, who has used executive orders to push for a nationwide crackdown on noncitizen voting. The modified SAVE system, criticized as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, was a key pillar of Trump's second election executive order signed earlier this year.
Reactions from Officials and Advocates
James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), responded to the ruling on social media, saying, "It's amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist." DHS referred to his post as its official comment. The Department of Justice said in an emailed statement that it would "continue to aggressively defend President Trump's immigration enforcement agenda and DHS's use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship."
Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus, from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the ruling an "across the board victory." He emphasized that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of being unlawfully purged from voter rolls due to database errors. Mark Johnson, a law professor at the University of Kansas, stated, "It couldn't be more clear that the SAVE program violates federal privacy laws. An executive order from Trump cannot override a federal law. It's an illegal idea. Plus it's a bad idea."
Impact on Voters and States
Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential felony leading to deportation. It is also rare, accounting for a tiny fraction of those on state voter rolls. At least 25 states used SAVE to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program.
Anthony Nel, a South Africa native who became a US citizen more than a decade ago, had his voter registration in Denton, Texas, temporarily canceled last year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE. The check wrongly identified him as a potential noncitizen. "I hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for granted," he said in a text message.
Privacy Concerns and Legal Violations
The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and five unnamed US citizens, alleged that the revamped SAVE program violated Americans' privacy and voting rights. They also claimed the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about changes to the system. Judge Sooknanan wrote, "The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."
In her ruling, the judge said the plaintiffs had shown that the updated system identified some lawful voters as noncitizens and that states using it "are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information."
Role of Elon Musk's DOGE in Updating SAVE
During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Trump pushed false claims of widespread noncitizen voting, Republican secretaries of state requested improvements to SAVE to make it more efficient for catching noncitizens on their rolls. One limitation was that the system could check only a single individual at a time. DHS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) delivered on those requests in 2025, making SAVE free for election officials, allowing agencies to search voters by the thousands, and permitting queries using names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers instead of requiring DHS-issued identification numbers.
Several secretaries of state have said the SAVE overhaul improved its value as one of multiple tools they use to assess voter citizenship. However, the court ruling now leaves the future of the program uncertain.
