The Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to use a controversial government program in its aggressive search for alleged voter fraud, increasing the likelihood that eligible voters will be wrongly labeled as noncitizens due to faulty data and removed from the rolls.

The court’s conservative majority wrote that the government was likely to prevail on the merits of the case, overturning a district court order blocking the Trump administration’s use of the program. “The District Court’s order thus inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections,” the GOP-appointed justices wrote in an unsigned opinion. “Under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented on behalf of the court’s three Democratic appointees. “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote.

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database run by the Department of Homeland Security has a long and documented history of producing false positives of noncitizens voting, leading to sensational headlines of alleged voter fraud that turn out to be untrue on closer inspection. The database was created in 1986 to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits but has been dramatically expanded by the Trump administration to check voter eligibility and produce federal citizenship lists that could supplant state voter rolls.

Following an executive order by Trump in March 2025, the administration revamped the database to add information on native-born Americans, Social Security numbers, and the ability to do bulk searches, all of which increase the possibility that eligible voters will be wrongly tagged as noncitizens and have their voter registrations canceled at the state level. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis and I reported last year, while “using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up........

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