Supreme Court allows Trump admin to use federal voter eligibility database during appeal

An order issued Friday by the Supreme Court temporarily allows the Trump administration to move forward with a mass voter verification system.

The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. 

Because existing law blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, the immediate impact of Friday's order on the upcoming midterms is likely limited, the Associated Press reported. States' use of the SAVE program is voluntary.

Norm Eisen, a senior fellow with Brookings, agreed that the Supreme Court's ruling was restrained. 

"Don't overreact to the SCOTUS SAVE database decision," Eisen wrote on X. "Page 6 of the decision makes clear that we are in the 90-day statutory window when mass changes can't be made to voter lists!"

The court’s order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the Republican administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, saying it violated Americans’ privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.

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A federal appeals court declined to pause Sooknanan's ruling, prompting the administration's appeal to the Supreme Court. 

The Trump administration moved to expand SAVE after the president signed an executive order directing the creation of a federal voter registration list and imposed new restrictions on eligibility for voting by mail as part of a broader effort to combat voter fraud.

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The SAVE program was created in 1986 under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. The Trump administration last year moved to significantly expand its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics, the AP says, worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in dissenting.

"In my view… 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 in a dissenting opinion. "This imbalance, along with the Government’s improbable merits arguments, should have compelled the Court to deny the stay."

But the majority pushed back on concerns that lawful voters could simply be removed from state voter rolls, noting that federal officials are required to contact individuals flagged by SAVE to seek additional information if their citizenship cannot be confirmed.

The majority also noted that SAVE has long allowed federal, state and local agencies to verify citizenship and immigration status using records maintained by the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and Department of State.

"The Supreme Court’s order allows the federal government to share information in its possession concerning people’s apparent citizenship status to help election officials register eligible voters while preventing the improper addition of non-citizens to the registration rolls," Michael Morley, director of the Election Law Center at Florida State University, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "The Court recognized Congress expressly endorsed such information sharing in 1996 amendments to federal immigration law."

The Supreme Court's stay is temporary, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit could still rule against the SAVE program, potentially sending the case back to the Supreme Court.

Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, said the Supreme Court already "got it right."

"The Trump Administration’s SAVE expansion just makes it easier for states to get federal citizenship data to help them clean up voter rolls. Once again, left-wing interests are doing everything they can to block states from verifying citizenship on the eve of a federal election, and for the second time in a week they have lost in court. This a major win for election integrity."

 Fox News' Shannon Bream, Bill Mears, Ashley J. DiMella and the Associated Press contributed to this report.