The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday to let the Trump administration use a federal citizenship database to help verify voters ahead of the midterm elections, lifting a lower court order that had blocked the Department of Homeland Security from expanding the 40-year-old Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system for that purpose. The unsigned majority opinion found that blocking the database’s use “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections,” concluding that “under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay.”

Despite the headline outcome, the court’s conservative majority itself acknowledged the ruling’s practical effect will be limited, since a separate federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, prohibits states from purging voters within 90 days of an election. That restriction means the Trump administration can only conduct “individualized inquiries” to verify specific voters rather than perform the sweeping bulk searches the modernized SAVE system was originally designed to enable. President Trump has repeatedly framed noncitizen voting as a serious threat to election integrity, though audits of voter rolls have consistently found that voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare. On the core legal question, the majority rejected arguments that federal law barred the administration from expanding the database, writing that Congress, through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, had already authorized “an information-sharing regime like the modified SAVE program,” and found the administration would suffer irreparable harm if barred from using the database during the election cycle.

The court’s three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, dissented sharply, disputing that Congress had ever authorized this kind of database expansion. They argued the majority misread the underlying immigration law to override “the limits that privacy laws impose on the sharing of citizenship information with DHS.” Justice Jackson wrote directly, “there is no reason to believe that Congress meant to repeal laws that would otherwise prohibit federal agencies from disclosing citizenship information.” She also challenged the majority’s irreparable-harm reasoning, arguing the real risk falls on voters rather than the government: “in my view, however, 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.” Because of the Voter Registration Act’s timing restrictions, the dissenting justices characterized the ruling’s near-term consequences as likely “minimal” and “short-term,” even while raising alarm about what it signals for the underlying legal question.

BREAKING: The Supreme Court Rules 6-3 To Let The Trump Administration Use Federal Citizenship Database To Screen Voters Ahead Of The Midterms, But Liberal Justices Warn That The Ruling Misreads The Underlying Immigration Law And Will Have “Minimal” Real-World Impact 🏛️