- 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.
> 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.
> Surprisingly it only seems like one party does this, the party that supposedly supports democracy.
I think this is a bit myopic. Democrats have been just as guilty if not more of pushing policy through the court system and appointing activist judges. It just was just in the pursuit of policy goals and not securing personal power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.
The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database
> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
>> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
>It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
How's the database used? From what I can tell it's a database of non-citizens that claimed benefits, so using it as a blacklist against voter rolls seems... fine? Even if the original premise of "there's hoards illegal immigrants voting" is questionable.
> It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote. So even if they use SAVE to "flag" potential voters, they are still going to have to provide people a way to provide proof of citizenship.
My prediction is that republican-led states are going to implement this for voting and throw their state elections into chaos, while states that don't implement do just fine.
Wow I haven’t heard of the SAVE database at all before today, despite knowing about e-verify and SEVIS and similar programs. Reading Wikipedia there’s also VIS and PCQS, two more systems I haven’t heard of. It seems that the country’s distaste for a national ID not only forces each state to issue IDs but also the federal government to create a patchwork of slightly different ID programs.
The main issue is not distaste per se, though there are bi-partisan factions that oppose a national ID.
The Supreme Court has consistently asserted that a mandatory Federal ID is unconstitutional because that is a power reserved for the individual States. It is the same reason everyone has a Social Security card but they are explicitly not to be used as an ID. Every time Congress has tried to constructively invent a loophole to work around this prohibition the Supreme Court disallowed it.
The US government can issue IDs. Many people have multiple Federal IDs. The US government just can't make everyone have one or use them. It is what it is.
As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.
Serious attempts to analyze the budget with the goal of addressing over-spending generally omit Social Security, because it's paid for with a dedicated tax. Repealing Social Security entirely wouldn't do much to address the budget deficit, certainly nowhere near as much as naive "look at how bit that part of this pie graph is!" analyses suggest it would.
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
The DHS SAVE which is the same backend data source used by CMS HUB Verify Lawful Presense (VLP) has been used by State systems (i.e. State Medicare/Medicaid Eligibility Systems) for verifying residency status of individuals. This isn't really new.
In my life I have known dozens (maybe hundreds?) of so-called illegal aliens. They all tell the same story: they came to the US to earn money to support their families. I have NEVER heard someone tell me they came to the US to vote, or they intend to vote, or they even know what voting is. So, this idea that millions of illegals are voting just doesn't align with my reality, and honestly, I don't think it aligns with any reality.
The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.
The money is being spent because Trump cannot admit that he lost at something. He knows his approval is extremely low, so he prefers chaos and say “they cheated, I didn’t lose”
It's not a real issue but it has the base riled up. A MAGA acquaintance told me he was a "single issue voter" based on that fear. I think he phrased it that way to sound principled but the very aspect of being a "single issue voter" shows a lack of understanding of the full impact of that vote.
What the Right has done is take the fact that there are some communities (in liberal areas) that have allowed non-citizens to vote in community issues, which is not entirely unreasonable. They then mash up that "fact" and trumpet it as an attack on our system by "illegals".
Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?
The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.
An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.
I know people are generally really cynical of SCOTUS these days (with some warrant), but SCOTUS is at least supposed to be neutral towards the other branches. Their job is to interpret the law, not pick and choose favorites.
In this case, I think they are not completely unreasonable. This specific move is one of the things the executive branch has been allowed to do, by previous legislators who gave it this power.
> it's my wife's fault we raised the flag upside down on January 6
Yeah, there's quite a lot of reason to believe SCOTUS is political. I think the simplest one: the conservative justices lied and/or told half-truths about their views on Roe v Wade. Under oath. The ones who lied are liars. The ones who dodged the question are politicos.
The States decide who they send to Congress to represent them. The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
> Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections
In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.
> The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
The federal government is not forcing states to use the SAVE database. They are simply not interfering with states that want to use it to "make this determination".
The Supreme Court ruled that it is 100% constitutional for states to disenfranchise voters based on party affiliation. I am not constitutional expert so I'll take them at their word that this is indeed the case.
So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.
Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.
No it didn't. Is this some interpretation of yours based on a decision about gerrymandering maybe? I suggest you try again without treating your inferences as shared facts.
The opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/588/18-422/) is pretty clear. The North Carolina and Maryland redistricting committees both sought to override the will of the voters. They had specific, explicit goals for precisely how many Democrats and how many Republicans should be elected in their state, and they knew the voters would not vote in accordance with those goals, so they redrew the maps in a successful attempt to ensure the partisan balance they desired. To me that's a clear example of disenfranchisement.
The Supreme Court didn't quite rule that this was constitutional, I suppose, only that no court is allowed to consider the question.
hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1
remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all
if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028
of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override
Even if the Democrats take the House and the Senate this year, and pass a new Voting Rights Act, there's no reason to believe it will have any effect, since it will be immediately vetoed by the President. So I'm not sure your expectations are in line with reality here.
26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.
>They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
1. Source?
2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?
Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.
So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.
- 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". 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.
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.
I think this is a bit myopic. Democrats have been just as guilty if not more of pushing policy through the court system and appointing activist judges. It just was just in the pursuit of policy goals and not securing personal power.
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.
Does the decision make this easier?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
> Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.
The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database
> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
https://apnews.com/article/save-database-noncitizen-voters-t...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-save-system...
>It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
How's the database used? From what I can tell it's a database of non-citizens that claimed benefits, so using it as a blacklist against voter rolls seems... fine? Even if the original premise of "there's hoards illegal immigrants voting" is questionable.
Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote. So even if they use SAVE to "flag" potential voters, they are still going to have to provide people a way to provide proof of citizenship.
The main issue is not distaste per se, though there are bi-partisan factions that oppose a national ID.
The Supreme Court has consistently asserted that a mandatory Federal ID is unconstitutional because that is a power reserved for the individual States. It is the same reason everyone has a Social Security card but they are explicitly not to be used as an ID. Every time Congress has tried to constructively invent a loophole to work around this prohibition the Supreme Court disallowed it.
The US government can issue IDs. Many people have multiple Federal IDs. The US government just can't make everyone have one or use them. It is what it is.
SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
Link the comparison please. I already know what the numbers are
The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.
What the Right has done is take the fact that there are some communities (in liberal areas) that have allowed non-citizens to vote in community issues, which is not entirely unreasonable. They then mash up that "fact" and trumpet it as an attack on our system by "illegals".
Their dishonesty knows no bounds.
Sounds like something Philip K Dick came up with.
The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.
An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.
In this case, I think they are not completely unreasonable. This specific move is one of the things the executive branch has been allowed to do, by previous legislators who gave it this power.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of reason to believe SCOTUS is political. I think the simplest one: the conservative justices lied and/or told half-truths about their views on Roe v Wade. Under oath. The ones who lied are liars. The ones who dodged the question are politicos.
Which is the unconstitutional part?
> Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections
In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.
The federal government is not forcing states to use the SAVE database. They are simply not interfering with states that want to use it to "make this determination".
So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.
Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.
The Supreme Court didn't quite rule that this was constitutional, I suppose, only that no court is allowed to consider the question.
remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all
if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028
of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override
26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.
They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
1. Source?
2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?
This something like an order of magnitude lower than the error margin.
So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.