WASHINGTON, D.C (July 29, 2025) – TODAY, Fair Elections Center, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit voting rights organization, released an issue brief, “Eligible Voters at Risk: Examining Changes to USCIS’s SAVE System.” The report addresses extremely troubling recent changes to the ways state and local election agencies can use DHS-USCIS’s SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) system to investigate voters’ citizenship status. Notably, agencies are being instructed to use SAVE to investigate the citizenship of U.S.-born citizens via a new partnership with the Social Security Administration. This is a massive expansion of SAVE’s use, where previously it could only confirm the citizenship status of naturalized and derived citizens using DHS records. These changes, made with little public explanation from the Trump administration, significantly increase the risk of disenfranchising eligible voters across the country, especially as more states sign up to use the retooled system.
As the brief explains in detail, these recent modifications raise questions of accuracy, data reliability, lack of procedural clarity, and federal administrative overreach into election administration. This brief relies in part on information about SAVE and SSA that Fair Elections Center unearthed during its litigation challenging Arizona’s citizenship investigation procedures, including a letter from SSA disclaiming the reliability of its citizenship data and deposition testimony from the USCIS officials who run SAVE. To protect the freedom to vote for all citizens, election officials should avoid relying on incomplete, inaccurate, or absent information. Advocates and journalists must closely scrutinize how states interpret the retooled SAVE system’s results to ensure these new processes do not make it harder for eligible voters to vote.
Read and share the full report here. For further information, elaboration, or media inquiries, please contact media@fairelectionscenter.org.
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Fair Elections Center is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to safeguarding the future of our democracy through innovative efforts focused on voting rights and civic engagement. We use advocacy, litigation, organizing, education, and technology to protect and expand the right to vote, understanding the particular impact on disenfranchised, underrepresented, and marginalized communities. Through our unique partnerships with hundreds of campuses across the country, we are able to empower millions of new voters to participate in our democracy. Our litigation and advocacy efforts across dozens of states allows us to anticipate and counteract threats to free and fair elections. With our visionary use of technology we are able to support election administration throughout the nation.