Thread

Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks

79 points · 105 comments · speckx

legitster · 1790366819 · focus · HN ↗
My 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". <a href="https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/25/the-supreme-court-revives-the-controversial-save-data-system/" rel="nofollow">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.
1. ok_dad · 1790367437 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. physicallyIllfr · 1790368136 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah its part corruption and the weaponized taboo of second guessing election results.
    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.
2. pstuart · 1790367771 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. skinfaxi · 1790369643 · focus · HN ↗
    Didn't it recently come to light of NJ registering thousands of non-citizens to vote?
    pstuart · 1790370060 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/trump-overstates-magnitude-of-noncitizen-voting-in-new-jersey/" rel="nofollow">https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/trump-overstates-magnitude...
    skinfaxi · 1790390886 · focus · HN ↗
    So what's the allowed level of voter fraud we should accept? And the fact check is about votes not registered voters. Funny how it focuses on national elections when local elections can be swayed by handfuls of votes.
    AnimalMuppet · 1790391796 · focus · HN ↗
    What level of suppression of legitimate voters are we willing to accept in order to avoid voter fraud?
    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.
    pstuart · 1790441595 · focus · HN ↗
    If you read the link I provided it shows that what happened was an administrative error and a relatively small number (~400) of those people voted, but they likely didn't engage in intentional fraud -- they likely thought they were entitled and did so.
    But to the point of even 400 non-eligible voters participating, that is 400 too much.
    If find the framing of your question bordering on disingenuous but I'll charitably assume that it is willfully ignorant.
    We should have zero voter fraud. We should have zero electoral fraud.
    Voter fraud itself is incredibly rare in US elections:
    <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/voting-elections/vote-suppression/myth-voter-fraud" rel="nofollow">https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/voting-elections/vote-s...
    But you position yourself as expecting fair elections, and if you really do, you would understand that fair comprises not just keeping ineligible voters from doing so, but also allowing eligible voters to do so.
    There's been an incredible amount of fuckery by the GOP to disenfranchise citizens of their rights to vote. But do you care about that?
    Do you care that Trump is working to install loyalists into positions of election officials who are loyal to him, rather than the historical position of neutral officials who honor the democratic process?
    <a href="https://nlihc.org/resource/history-voter-suppression" rel="nofollow">https://nlihc.org/resource/history-voter-suppression
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
    <a href="https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/historyvotersuppression/websitesandresources" rel="nofollow">https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/historyvotersuppression/web...
    There's plenty more where that came from, but I doubt you'll look at any of that because that isn't likely a concern of you.
    So I ask you: is your concern about "your team" not winning or about free and fair elections. I'm pretty sure what that answer is but would welcome your response.
3. malfist · 1790367986 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
  1. therealpygon · 1790368221 · focus · HN ↗
    Does one of them not supposedly support democracy?
  2. legitster · 1790368695 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    RunSet · 1790370552 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not "pushing policy" if the policy has a popular mandate.
    Compare the respective numbers of Democratic and Republican presidents in your lifetime who attained the office while losing the popular vote.
    pocksuppet · 1790373083 · focus · HN ↗
    Popular mandate is surely 65% as the bare minimum. 51% is not a mandate, it just shows they hate you slightly less than the other guy.
4. cosmicgadget · 1790368009 · focus · HN ↗
  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?
  1. legitster · 1790368362 · focus · HN ↗
    Based on this NPR article, there are only about 28k voters nationwide on the "potentially fraudulent" list. And when Texas tried pursing theirs, they only ended up being able to act on ~100 of them.
    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.
    cosmicgadget · 1790368700 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you, it makes me wonder why the administration is pursuing this at all. Optics? Or is there something more Stephen Miller-y going on here?
    legitster · 1790369090 · focus · HN ↗
    100% I think it's optics.
    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.
    usernomdeguerre · 1790372252 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd say it serves multiple purposes. Optics is certainly one of them "look upon my works, ye Republican...".
    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.
    kijashdkujdfhas · 1790419101 · focus · HN ↗
    Remember when Pam Bondi said Trump had saved 258 million American lives?
    <a href="https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trump-saves-258-million-lives/5162180" rel="nofollow">https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trum...
    dmitrygr · 1790371702 · focus · HN ↗
    > it makes me wonder why the administration is pursuing this at all.
    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.
    cosmicgadget · 1790382924 · focus · HN ↗
    > We are hypocrites if, at great expenditure, we don't use flock cameras to enforce jaywalking and drones to ensure all landscaping is permitted.
    Okay.
    dmitrygr · 1790434046 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not a quote of anything I said. My original comment had not been edited. If you choose to convert my statements to strange exaggerated strawmen, do so without a quote implication please.
    cosmicgadget · 1790633932 · focus · HN ↗
    Nah, I'm good.
  2. jandrewrogers · 1790372800 · focus · HN ↗
    Challenging cast ballots is non-scalable because it requires a lot of formal judicial process separately for each ballot challenged. Realistically a State could go after less than a thousand.
    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.
    cosmicgadget · 1790431451 · focus · HN ↗
    My vague recollection from 2020 was that motivated individuals were challenging hundreds to thousands of ballots in critical precincts (addressing the scalability). Of course the voters were all eligible so they challenged based on the mail ballots being properly signed and dated.

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