#noncitizen-voting-myth

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.

Trump's Multi-Front Assault on How Americans Vote — a Mail-Ballot Executive Order, a Bid for a National Voter Database, Citizenship-Document Demands, and a Rushed USPS System That Could Reject Ballots in Bulk — Has Run Into a Wall of Public Rejection: Mail Voting Is Popular Across Both Parties, Voters Tell Pollsters His Fraud Claims Are "BS," and His Broader Power Grab Drew One of the Largest Protest Days in American History

Trump has spent 2026 waging a coordinated campaign against how Americans vote — an executive order directing the Postal Service to restrict mail ballots, an effort to compile a national database of voters' private data, demands that registrants produce documents like birth certificates and passports, and, as a whistleblower recently revealed, a rushed USPS system that could reject entire batches of ballots. The stated rationale is "election integrity" and the specter of noncitizen voting. The problem for Trump is that Americans are not buying it, and the backlash has been broad and measurable. Mail and early voting are popular across party lines — Pew found 60% of Americans, including 37% of Republicans, believe people should be able to vote early or absentee without an excuse. CNN's chief data analyst, Harry Enten, summarized the polling bluntly: voters feel Trump is "full of it. Full of BS" on mail voting, the attacks "aren't sticking," and he'd be better off moving on. The rejection extends beyond surveys: the "No Kings" mobilization against Trump's imperial turn filled all 50 states with more than 3,300 events, among the largest single-day protests in U.S. history, and roughly 43% of registered voters say they support it, while a Navigator poll found 52% of Americans describe the federal government as "authoritarian." The through-line is that Trump is attacking a voting method his own voters like, on a fraud premise the evidence does not support, and the public — in polls and in the streets — is pushing back.