Comment by legitster
3 hours ago
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". 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.
> 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.
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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.
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Does one of them not supposedly support democracy?
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.
Does the decision make this easier?
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.
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?
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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.
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.
Didn't it recently come to light of NJ registering thousands of non-citizens to vote?
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/trump-overstates-magnitude...