Following court order, DHS appears to have shut down SAVE for checking voter citizenship

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seems to have acceded to a court order and shut down the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database for use as a voter registration list citizenship checker.

In a ruling last week, U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ordered DHS to set aside upgrades it had made to SAVE to turn it into a tool for checking the citizenship status of millions of registered voters at a time, which President Donald Trump had directed last spring. At Trump’s bidding, Social Security Administration data was added to SAVE’s immigrant visa and naturalization records and the system was modified to allow for bulk searches using partial social security numbers. 

Lawyers for plaintiffs in the lawsuit told Democracy Docket that government attorneys informed them that SAVE’s bulk upload functions and social security number searches have been disabled, and that state election officials who had been using the system were no longer able to do so. 

Democracy Docket asked DHS to confirm they had shut down SAVE’s expanded functions in accordance with Sooknanan’s court order. The agency did not provide a direct answer in response.

Before the order, the expanded SAVE program had been used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters, mostly from Republican-led states. The program flagged thousands of voters as potential noncitizens, but subsequent investigations have shown many were actually citizens eligible to vote.

To date, DHS has not made the suspended SAVE functionality clear on the program’s website, and a June 23 update — the day after Sooknanan published her opinion — touts new case processing functions.

In the wake of the ruling, pro-voting advocates were worried that the administration might attempt to ignore or evade the judge’s injunction, given its previous attempts to avoid court orders in other matters.