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. 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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