Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.
The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database
a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
How's the database used? From what I can tell it's a database of non-citizens that claimed benefits, so using it as a blacklist against voter rolls seems... fine? Even if the original premise of "there's hoards illegal immigrants voting" is questionable.
Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote. So even if they use SAVE to "flag" potential voters, they are still going to have to provide people a way to provide proof of citizenship.
hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1
remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all
if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028
of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override
Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.
So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.
They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
1. Source?
2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?
Even if the Democrats take the House and the Senate this year, and pass a new Voting Rights Act, there's no reason to believe it will have any effect, since it will be immediately vetoed by the President. So I'm not sure your expectations are in line with reality here.
26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.
As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?
The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.
An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.
The States decide who they send to Congress to represent them. The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections
In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.
The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
The federal government is not forcing states to use the SAVE database. They are simply not interfering with states that want to use it to "make this determination".
The Supreme Court ruled that it is 100% constitutional for states to disenfranchise voters based on party affiliation. I am not constitutional expert so I'll take them at their word that this is indeed the case.
So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.
Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.
No it didn't. Is this some interpretation of yours based on a decision about gerrymandering maybe? I suggest you try again without treating your inferences as shared facts.
I know people are generally really cynical of SCOTUS these days (with some warrant), but SCOTUS is at least supposed to be neutral towards the other branches. Their job is to interpret the law, not pick and choose favorites.
In this case, I think they are not completely unreasonable. This specific move is one of the things the executive branch has been allowed to do, by previous legislators who gave it this power.
Wow I haven’t heard of the SAVE database at all before today, despite knowing about e-verify and SEVIS and similar programs. Reading Wikipedia there’s also VIS and PCQS, two more systems I haven’t heard of. It seems that the country’s distaste for a national ID not only forces each state to issue IDs but also the federal government to create a patchwork of slightly different ID programs.
The main issue is not distaste per se, though there are bi-partisan factions that oppose a national ID.
The Supreme Court has consistently asserted that a mandatory Federal ID is unconstitutional because that is a power reserved for the individual States. It is the same reason everyone has a Social Security card but they are explicitly not to be used as an ID. Every time Congress has tried to constructively invent a loophole to work around this prohibition the Supreme Court disallowed it.
The US government can issue IDs. Many people have multiple Federal IDs. The US government just can't make everyone have one or use them. It is what it is.
- SAVE was a database established in 1986 to determine if immigrants were eligible for federal benefits
- Starting in 2005, some states used it to check their voter registrations
- By executive order, the administration merged it with the SSN database to make bulk searches easier
- Organizations sued, and a lower court said the administration had to hold off on rolling out the changes while the lawsuit was pending. The Supreme Court overruled the stay, saying the lawsuit had not proved enough merit to stop the policy.
- It is still up to states whether they use SAVE or not. If someone shows up in the SAVE database, the state may ask them to provide proof of citizenship.
The concern here from the dissent is that states are going to purge their voter registrations while awaiting the ruling. But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits.
Yea but those mass lawsuits won't happen or matter until after midterms at this point, so even if they did illegal stuff in the end the votes will have been suppressed successfully. In a war, if you do a war crime, the dead are still dead even if the person who committed the war crime is accountable later. In politics, if they do a criminal act like this, they win an election and never have to account for their actions, because their side won and won't call them to account.
Every "concern" raised by the Trump administration is cover for voter disenfranchisement. Period.
Voter fraud is incredibly rare, but I have a gut feeling that electoral fraud has happened and will continue to get worse, courtesy of the same administration.
It must be remembered that every accusation from them is a confession.
For the acolytes that down vote me, at least make your case on where and why I am wrong. My comment is as a citizen, not as a partisan.
But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits
Except we've seen this before. States purge roles, judge orders them to restore it, oopsie we can't do that before an election, judge permits it to continue until after the election. We've seen this with voter roll purges, gerrymandering, etc. Surprisingly it only seems like one party does this, the party that supposedly supports democracy.
As I understand it, one of the main disenfranchisement tactics is to challenge ballots already cast. It's potentially very effective because the voter must see that their vote was challenged and then proactively contest it.
The DHS SAVE which is the same backend data source used by CMS HUB Verify Lawful Presense (VLP) has been used by State systems (i.e. State Medicare/Medicaid Eligibility Systems) for verifying residency status of individuals. This isn't really new.
In my life I have known dozens (maybe hundreds?) of so-called illegal aliens. They all tell the same story: they came to the US to earn money to support their families. I have NEVER heard someone tell me they came to the US to vote, or they intend to vote, or they even know what voting is. So, this idea that millions of illegals are voting just doesn't align with my reality, and honestly, I don't think it aligns with any reality.
The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.
It's not a real issue but it has the base riled up. A MAGA acquaintance told me he was a "single issue voter" based on that fear. I think he phrased it that way to sound principled but the very aspect of being a "single issue voter" shows a lack of understanding of the full impact of that vote.
What the Right has done is take the fact that there are some communities (in liberal areas) that have allowed non-citizens to vote in community issues, which is not entirely unreasonable. They then mash up that "fact" and trumpet it as an attack on our system by "illegals".
Who is the editor on this article? Why would they expect the reader to know what the SAVE database is and what its original purpose was for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database
It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
https://apnews.com/article/save-database-noncitizen-voters-t...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-save-system...
How's the database used? From what I can tell it's a database of non-citizens that claimed benefits, so using it as a blacklist against voter rolls seems... fine? Even if the original premise of "there's hoards illegal immigrants voting" is questionable.
Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote. So even if they use SAVE to "flag" potential voters, they are still going to have to provide people a way to provide proof of citizenship.
hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1
remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all
if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028
of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override
They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.
So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.
This something like an order of magnitude lower than the error margin.
Why not link it here so we can all read their report
1. Source?
2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?
Even if the Democrats take the House and the Senate this year, and pass a new Voting Rights Act, there's no reason to believe it will have any effect, since it will be immediately vetoed by the President. So I'm not sure your expectations are in line with reality here.
26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.
I was wondering what this was.
SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
Turns out you can, but for how long?
As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.
Two things:
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
Have fun comparing defense vs welfare/entitlements per year.
Link the comparison please. I already know what the numbers are
For as long as you make it possible and attractive for new immigrants to join the this Ponzi schemw
Calling the welfare state a Ponzi scheme doesn’t magically make every new entrant a net contributor.
Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?
The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.
An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.
Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections is what Democrats need to retake control of Congress?
Which is the unconstitutional part?
The States decide who they send to Congress to represent them. The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.
The federal government is not forcing states to use the SAVE database. They are simply not interfering with states that want to use it to "make this determination".
The Supreme Court ruled that it is 100% constitutional for states to disenfranchise voters based on party affiliation. I am not constitutional expert so I'll take them at their word that this is indeed the case.
So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.
Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.
No it didn't. Is this some interpretation of yours based on a decision about gerrymandering maybe? I suggest you try again without treating your inferences as shared facts.
I know people are generally really cynical of SCOTUS these days (with some warrant), but SCOTUS is at least supposed to be neutral towards the other branches. Their job is to interpret the law, not pick and choose favorites.
In this case, I think they are not completely unreasonable. This specific move is one of the things the executive branch has been allowed to do, by previous legislators who gave it this power.
Wow I haven’t heard of the SAVE database at all before today, despite knowing about e-verify and SEVIS and similar programs. Reading Wikipedia there’s also VIS and PCQS, two more systems I haven’t heard of. It seems that the country’s distaste for a national ID not only forces each state to issue IDs but also the federal government to create a patchwork of slightly different ID programs.
The main issue is not distaste per se, though there are bi-partisan factions that oppose a national ID.
The Supreme Court has consistently asserted that a mandatory Federal ID is unconstitutional because that is a power reserved for the individual States. It is the same reason everyone has a Social Security card but they are explicitly not to be used as an ID. Every time Congress has tried to constructively invent a loophole to work around this prohibition the Supreme Court disallowed it.
The US government can issue IDs. Many people have multiple Federal IDs. The US government just can't make everyone have one or use them. It is what it is.
My human summarization of the decision:
- SAVE was a database established in 1986 to determine if immigrants were eligible for federal benefits
- Starting in 2005, some states used it to check their voter registrations
- By executive order, the administration merged it with the SSN database to make bulk searches easier
- Organizations sued, and a lower court said the administration had to hold off on rolling out the changes while the lawsuit was pending. The Supreme Court overruled the stay, saying the lawsuit had not proved enough merit to stop the policy.
- It is still up to states whether they use SAVE or not. If someone shows up in the SAVE database, the state may ask them to provide proof of citizenship.
The concern here from the dissent is that states are going to purge their voter registrations while awaiting the ruling. But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits.
Update: Per NPR, the SAVE database covers 65 million voters in 26 states, of which 28,635 have been flagged as "potential noncitizens". https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/25/the-supreme-court-rev...
In Texas, using this dataset, they were only able to bring forward 117 cases of fraudulent voting.
Yea but those mass lawsuits won't happen or matter until after midterms at this point, so even if they did illegal stuff in the end the votes will have been suppressed successfully. In a war, if you do a war crime, the dead are still dead even if the person who committed the war crime is accountable later. In politics, if they do a criminal act like this, they win an election and never have to account for their actions, because their side won and won't call them to account.
Every "concern" raised by the Trump administration is cover for voter disenfranchisement. Period.
Voter fraud is incredibly rare, but I have a gut feeling that electoral fraud has happened and will continue to get worse, courtesy of the same administration.
It must be remembered that every accusation from them is a confession.
For the acolytes that down vote me, at least make your case on where and why I am wrong. My comment is as a citizen, not as a partisan.
Except we've seen this before. States purge roles, judge orders them to restore it, oopsie we can't do that before an election, judge permits it to continue until after the election. We've seen this with voter roll purges, gerrymandering, etc. Surprisingly it only seems like one party does this, the party that supposedly supports democracy.
As I understand it, one of the main disenfranchisement tactics is to challenge ballots already cast. It's potentially very effective because the voter must see that their vote was challenged and then proactively contest it.
Does the decision make this easier?
The DHS SAVE which is the same backend data source used by CMS HUB Verify Lawful Presense (VLP) has been used by State systems (i.e. State Medicare/Medicaid Eligibility Systems) for verifying residency status of individuals. This isn't really new.
Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
Sounds like something Philip K Dick came up with.
In my life I have known dozens (maybe hundreds?) of so-called illegal aliens. They all tell the same story: they came to the US to earn money to support their families. I have NEVER heard someone tell me they came to the US to vote, or they intend to vote, or they even know what voting is. So, this idea that millions of illegals are voting just doesn't align with my reality, and honestly, I don't think it aligns with any reality.
The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.
It's not a real issue but it has the base riled up. A MAGA acquaintance told me he was a "single issue voter" based on that fear. I think he phrased it that way to sound principled but the very aspect of being a "single issue voter" shows a lack of understanding of the full impact of that vote.
What the Right has done is take the fact that there are some communities (in liberal areas) that have allowed non-citizens to vote in community issues, which is not entirely unreasonable. They then mash up that "fact" and trumpet it as an attack on our system by "illegals".
Their dishonesty knows no bounds.