#ketanji-brown-jackson

Months After Gutting the Voting Rights Act So Elected Officials Could Redraw Districts However They Please, the Supreme Court Handed Them the Other Half of the Power Over Elections — Clearing the Trump Administration to Let States Screen Voter Rolls With SAVE, a Federal Database So Flawed That More Than One in Five Texans It Flagged as Noncitizens Turned Out to Be Citizens — Over the Three Liberal Justices' Dissent That Disenfranchising "Even a Few Lawful Voters" Outweighs the Government's "Nonexistent" Harm

On September 25, 2026, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court and cleared the way for the Trump administration to let states use SAVE — the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database — to check the citizenship of registered voters before the November midterms. The order, on the emergency docket, drew a public dissent from the three liberal justices. The Court limited the ruling to "individualized" citizenship checks and noted that federal law still bars mass purges close to Election Day, reserving that larger question for a case next term. But the tool it revived is notoriously inaccurate, and it fails in one direction: it disproportionately flags naturalized citizens as ineligible. When Texas ran its voter rolls through SAVE, it identified 2,724 "potential noncitizens" — and then confirmed that at least 578 of them, more than one in five, were in fact U.S. citizens. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, dissented that "the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences" — noting there is no meaningful noncitizen-voting problem for the database to solve. Seen alongside the Court's April decision gutting the Voting Rights Act to free legislators to gerrymander at will, this ruling completes a pattern: having let elected officials decide how voters are grouped, the Court is now letting the political branches decide, through a faulty database, who counts as a voter at all.

The Supreme Court Cleared One of the Two Legal Roadblocks to Trump's Mail-Ballot Executive Order — a Decree That Would Let the Postal Service Refuse to Deliver Mail Ballots From States That Don't Hand Over Their Voter Rolls, Months Before the Midterms — Over a Dissent Warning It "Needlessly Injects Chaos" Into the Election; Justice Jackson Called It a "Kafkaesque Nightmare"

On August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court lifted one of two injunctions that had frozen Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting — an order that, among other things, would have the U.S. Postal Service decline to deliver mail ballots from any state that refuses to hand the federal government a list of every voter receiving one, impose new federal design and tracking standards on mail ballots, and put the Department of Homeland Security in the business of screening state voter rolls. The unsigned order fell along ideological lines. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, warning the ruling "needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections" and calling the situation a "Kafkaesque nightmare"; Justices Sotomayor and Kagan also dissented. Crucially, the order is not yet in effect: a second nationwide injunction — won by the League of Women Voters and other groups on August 11 — still stands, and legal experts expect the trial court to quickly block the Postal Service's newly finalized rule too. But the direction is unmistakable. The Constitution's Elections Clause gives states, not the president, the power to run federal elections, and two federal courts found Trump's order unconstitutional on exactly that ground. The Court didn't bless the order — it explicitly said implementing measures could still be unlawful — but it pulled away one of the barriers holding back a presidential attempt to dictate how Americans vote, mere months before they do.