A Limited Supreme Court Win for Trump's Voter Database
Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters won’t really impact the 2026 election. But 2028 is a different story.
Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal officials to create new systems that would allow state and local authorities to check the immigration status of both registered voters and would-be voters who were seeking to register. In an unsigned opinion issued on Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court, with all three Democratic appointees voting in dissent, allowed the Trump administration's efforts to proceed while the case plays out.
It was a notable Supreme Court win for Trump. However, thanks to a different federal law, the ruling's impact on the fast-approaching 2026 midterm elections will be a very limited one.
You’re reading Injustice System from Damon Root and Reason. Get more of Damon’s commentary on constitutional law and American history.
The case is Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters. At issue is a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE). State and local officials have already used the SAVE program's national database for purposes of verifying citizenship status in the context of employment and voting. What Trump's executive order did was expand the SAVE program so that the DHS could also draw on Social Security Administration records when processing these state and local requests.
The League of Women Voters and other groups challenging the expanded SAVE program argue that this executive expansion goes beyond what Congress actually authorized while also violating several federal privacy and administrative procedure laws. The groups also argue that lawful voters are likely to be purged by mistake as an unavoidable byproduct of putting these sweeping new procedures in place.
Those arguments by the legal challengers persuaded both the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which both ruled against the Trump administration. But now the Supreme Court, by a vote of 6–3, has granted the administration's request for a stay, which places those lower court rulings on hold while the administration fights it out on appeal. And the order further indicates that the administration has a likelihood of winning in the end.
"Although the plaintiff organizations likely have standing, their claims likely lack merit," the Supreme Court's unsigned order stated. Because "an information-sharing regime like the modified SAVE program" is likely permissible under federal law, "this Court is likely to reverse the District Court's holding that the federal defendants violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the [Administrative Procedure Act]."
Writing in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, faulted the majority for bending federal law in Trump's favor. "If there is a bright side to today's opinion," Jackson added, "it is that the per curiam will likely have minimal short-term impact" because of yet another federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, which says: "A State shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters."
In other words, because the Supreme Court's ruling in this case happened less than 90 days out from the 2026 midterms, any state that wanted to make use of the expanded SAVE program for a systemic removal of ineligible voters is barred from doing so in this year's election.
The 2028 election, however, will be a different story and will undoubtedly give rise to even more litigation as the expanded SAVE program is put to its intended use.
