A federal appeals court ruled that DHS cannot fully use its own citizenship database to help states verify voter rolls.
The decision, handed down Friday, came from a divided three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The panel voted 2-1 to deny the Trump administration’s request to resume the expanded version of the SAVE system, formally known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, while the administration pursues an appeal.
At issue is a June ruling by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, who blocked the expanded program nationwide. The appeals court declined to pause that block while litigation continues.
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As originally reported, the SAVE database is a DHS tool that government agencies use to verify citizenship and immigration status. It is not itself a voting system. In its original form, it had significant limitations. It could not verify people born in the United States, could not search by Social Security number, and required officials to submit verification requests one at a time.
Those limitations made the system largely impractical for large-scale voter roll verification. A state with millions of registered voters had no efficient way to compare that list against federal citizenship records.
That changed following a March 2025 executive order from President Trump. The administration expanded SAVE to allow bulk searches and Social Security number lookups. That upgrade was specifically what made it workable for states trying to cross-reference large voter files against federal data. It is also precisely what the court has now frozen.
The administration had asked the appeals court to let the expanded SAVE system operate while it challenged Judge Sooknanan’s ruling. The 2-1 panel rejected that request, leaving the original restrictions in place for now.
The core dispute does not involve whether noncitizens can vote. All parties agree they cannot. The question before the courts is narrower: whether the federal government may use its own citizenship database, in an upgraded form, to help states check whether the people on their voter rolls are actually citizens.
The administration argues the expansion is a straightforward and necessary election integrity measure. Critics have challenged it in court, and so far two federal judges have sided with those challengers.
The case now moves forward through the appeals process, with the expanded SAVE capabilities remaining blocked until the courts resolve the underlying dispute. The final outcome will determine whether states can use the enhanced federal database for voter verification, or whether officials must continue working within the older system’s significant constraints.
