The Trump administration has dramatically expanded a little-known immigration status verification tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, pulling in data from multiple federal databases and encouraging states to run information about millions of voters through the program.
Election officials and experts warn the changes have transformed SAVE from a limited-use immigration tool into an error-prone screening system that wrongly flags U.S. citizens as noncitizens and sweeps up vast amounts of Americans’ personal data. States that use the system risk disenfranchising voters and pointlessly increase burdens on already overworked election administrators.
We already have strict laws and safeguards that ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in our elections. The error-prone SAVE system is undermining our elections by jeopardizing the rights of U.S. citizens, and the federal government is promoting the expanded system as part of a broader effort to threaten the freedom to vote, improperly cast doubt on election results, and exert control over our elections.
Below are answers to key questions about what SAVE is, how it has changed, and why its use in election administration is raising serious concerns.
What is the SAVE system?
The SAVE system, which is managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), first launched in 1987 as a tool to help federal, state and local agencies verify individuals’ eligibility for government benefits based on their immigration status.
SAVE accessed USCIS databases with information about naturalized citizens and noncitizens who had interacted with the federal government, but it was not a comprehensive citizenship database. Because of SAVE’s narrow scope and clunky search function, fewer than a dozen states had an agreement with the federal government to use SAVE to check voter eligibility prior to 2025.
Driven by false election theories, beginning in 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) worked with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies to attempt to turn SAVE into a national citizenship database, collecting and compiling Americans’ private data into an unreliable system.
Now, at the administration’s urging, almost half of U.S. states have signed on to use the newly-expanded SAVE program for voter list maintenance or are in the process of signing a memorandum of agreement to use it — despite voluminous evidence that SAVE is falsely flagging eligible U.S. citizen voters. At the same time, the federal government is suing the majority of states to demand access to their full, unredacted voter rolls, which Campaign Legal Center is challenging.
Note that the SAVE system is distinct from the SAVE Act and/or SAVE America Act, legislation which the Trump administration has been pushing in Congress. Both the SAVE Act, introduced in 2025, and the SAVE America Act, introduced in 2026, include provisions stipulating that states check for citizenship in one of several ways, including use of the expanded SAVE program. Additionally, the bills both say that the DHS Secretary can respond to eligibility requests made by state election officials by using SAVE.
How has the SAVE tool changed since 2025?
Since DOGE imported new data from across the federal government, and USCIS changed how the program functions, SAVE is no longer a relatively limited system covering few individuals. The SAVE program now searches multiple databases that include data on almost everybody, such as Social Security Administration data — which is a notoriously unreliable source of citizenship information.
State or county officials can now bulk upload lists of voters instead of searching by one individual at a time, and can now perform checks of partial Social Security numbers such as the last 4 digits.
The problem is that the system has falsely and repeatedly identified eligible U.S. citizen voters as noncitizens.
Why was SAVE overhauled?
Our elections have numerous safeguards in place that are regularly analyzed and updated to make sure only U.S. citizens participate.
President Trump and his allies, however, have consistently sought to undermine confidence in our elections, both to undermine public confidence in our elections and impact their outcome. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Elon Musk and others manufactured and amplified false claims about voting, and several states also filed publicity-seeking lawsuits demanding the Biden administration check the citizenship of voters.
The SAVE overhaul was set into motion by President Trump’s March 25, 2025 executive order on voting, which directed the DHS Secretary to give state and local authorities no-cost access to federal systems “for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.” Trump also directed DHS to work with the DOGE administrator to review voter rolls.
CLC successfully challenged other aspects of the executive order and won. On April 3, 2026, we filed an amicus brief along with Common Cause, Center for Media and Democracy, and Protect Democracy in a separate case challenging parts of the SAVE overhaul.
How does the SAVE program work?
According to USCIS records from December 2025, when a state or other jurisdiction submits voter data to SAVE, the lookup first queries Social Security Administration (SSA) data to identify any indicators of citizenship or non-citizenship — despite the fact that SSA data is not a reliable source of citizenship information.
If the initial SAVE query provides a “foreign born” indicator, SAVE will try to access DHS and Department of State records. However, these searches are limited and insufficient to prove or disprove citizenship: For example, as of at least December 2025, SAVE could not search DHS files without an “A-number” (an immigration identifier) and SSA often does not have that information. As a result, many SAVE results are derived solely from stale SSA data.
USCIS then returns the list of potential noncitizens to the state or county. In practice, states have taken very different approaches. Missouri directed county election officials to suspend the registrations of voters flagged by SAVE — despite the tool making hundreds of errors. Texas directed county officials to “investigate” and begin the removal process for the names on the SAVE list but provided limited guidance.
In some cases, U.S. citizen voters had their registrations cancelled after not responding to a mailed notice from election officials, despite being eligible to vote.
Is the SAVE program reliable?
No. Reporting and public records indicate that SAVE has made “persistent mistakes” when reviewing state voter rolls and regularly misidentifies eligible U.S. citizen voters. For example, in one Texas county, more than half of the voters flagged by SAVE were in fact U.S. citizens. DHS has also had to correct information provided to five states after SAVE misidentified U.S. citizen voters.
Why do experts warn about the use of the overhauled SAVE program?
Particularly given the lack of transparency and adequate testing, expanding SAVE enhances the potential for error, which can result in eligible voters being disenfranchised.
Secretaries of State warned DHS in December 2025 that SAVE risks identifying “older Americans, naturalized citizens, and voters like married women who have changed their names” as non-citizens. Because no database being consulted by SAVE has complete or reliable information, and the amount of data being introduced is so much larger than in the past, errors magnify, especially with something as difficult as data matching across many sources.
The expanded use of SAVE can also increase the burden on election officials and unlawfully inserts the federal government into election administration functions that are primarily the responsibility of state and local officials. Federal officials have instructed state and local election administrators to conduct investigations and independently verify the often error-ridden results generated by SAVE, creating more work and confusion very close to an election. Secretaries of State have warned that these demands divert staff and resources away from their core election administration duties.
DHS has also acknowledged their intent to further incorporate more data into SAVE, increasing the numbers of individuals whose data is retained and heightening privacy concerns. Rather than serving as a limited tool for searching a discrete set of records, SAVE now encompasses a much larger population of individuals, with plans underway to incorporate still more private and unvetted data.
What results are states seeing so far?
Results from the SAVE system have been proven to be unreliable. Many states are finding out as they check the results that SAVE is prone to identifying eligible voters as non-citizens, especially if they have been naturalized.
In Missouri, election clerks were baffled by results that included people they knew to have naturalized. In Texas, voters felt unfairly targeted and intimidated after receiving letters asking them to prove once more that they had a right to vote, even though they were eligible voters. On March 26, 2026, we filed a lawsuit in Texas to stop these discriminatory purges.
Despite clear evidence of high error rates, the Trump administration is doubling down on the use of SAVE as part of a broader plan to assert control of our elections — all at the encouragement of those seeking to undermine trust in our elections who have been granted access to senior administration officials.
That’s why Campaign Legal Center has been working to challenge the use of the SAVE system for list maintenance, because every voter deserves to have their voice heard.