As my PJ Media colleague Catherine Salgado reported on Friday, the Supreme Court has cleared the Trump administration to go ahead with an expanded program that finds illegal aliens and other noncitizens registered to vote. The ruling allows the government to check voter registration records against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.
Forgetting the legal arguments in the case, it’s just common sense that we should be able to have safeguards in place to ensure that noncitizens don’t vote in our elections. This should have been a unanimous ruling. But it wasn’t, and you don’t need more than one guess to figure out who didn’t side with the majority.
Huge win at the Supreme Court for President Trump and election integrity! The updated and improved SAVE database--better than ever to check to see if someone is in the country legally--can go into effect. This is a massive help in ensuring elections are safe and secure. pic.twitter.com/4rGVrw9e81
— Eric W. (@EWess92) September 25, 2026
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. I wish I could say that it surprised me, but I've watched this trio long enough to know how these cases usually end.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) runs SAVE to confirm who qualifies for certain federal benefits. The Trump administration argued that the old version needed a serious overhaul before it could help states clean up their rolls.
"DHS’s SAVE system was not up to the job because it lacked comprehensive data about natural-born citizens, permitted searches only one record at a time, and required the user to supply a person’s alien registration number (or other DHS number)—which States often do not know," Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court.
So the administration fixed it.
After President Trump directed DHS to give election officials proper access to verify citizenship, the agency upgraded the system and linked SAVE to Social Security records, among other improvements.
The court’s decision was a nice victory after the court let states keep counting ballots for days after Election Day and blocked Trump’s mail-in voting executive order. I think the court got those wrong, even though the cases had legitimate arguments on both sides.
Related: Supreme Court Approves Expanded Voter Verification Program
But keeping noncitizens from voting falls into a different category altogether. It's about as simple as a legal question gets, and I struggle to understand how anyone wearing a robe on the highest court in the land could reach the opposite conclusion. For years, Democrats insisted noncitizen voting was a made-up scandal. Then cases started turning up, and the talking point quietly shifted to "well, it hardly ever happens."
One illegal vote is one too many.
"The Court also focuses only on the harms the Government will purportedly suffer absent a stay, disregarding the harms that the modified SAVE system has caused, and will likely continue to cause, to lawful voters. The Court thus misuses its equitable powers," the three justices claimed.
Jackson went further. "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," she wrote.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Jackson, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, wrote:
— Democracy Docket (@DemocracyDocket) September 25, 2026
"The Court focuses only on the harms the Government will purportedly suffer absent a stay, disregarding the harms that the modified SAVE system has caused, and will likely continue to cause,… pic.twitter.com/8hWubo92Ok
Think about that for a second. Jackson calls the harm "nonexistent," even though every illegal ballot cancels out an American citizen’s vote. Not that she cares.
The order doesn't end the fight. The case heads back to the lower courts, but the upgraded system can operate during the midterms while the litigation plays out.
Sadly, the dissent reads as if it came straight from a Democrat Party talking-points memo. Whenever the left has to choose between securing an election and leaving the door open to fraud, it picks the open door. Every. Single. Time. Look at voter ID. Democrats oppose it by claiming, without a shred of evidence, that it disenfranchises minorities, as if black and Hispanic Americans can't manage to get an ID card. Ironically, Voter ID remains popular among the very minority voters Democrats claim to protect. The only people who still fight election integrity are Democrats in Washington and their allies on the Supreme Court.
That brings us back to these three justices. Barack Obama appointed Sotomayor and Kagan, and Joe Biden appointed Jackson. They were all appointed for a reason: to do the Democrat Party’s bidding. They don’t care about the Constitution; that wasn't the job they were nominated to do.
