Starting in 2025, the Trump administration began making major changes to a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data access system that allows state and local election officials to use the system to investigate the citizenship status of voters and voter registration applicants.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE, was originally created by federal immigration law to verify the citizenship of individuals applying for certain public benefits and was not designed to investigate the citizenship status of registered voters. SAVE does not maintain its own data but rather is a tool to query available records. Though technical in nature, changes made to SAVE throughout 2025 and into 2026 may have a negative impact on voters across the country, especially as more states sign up to use the retooled system.
The Social Security Administration does not have reliable citizenship data and has admitted as much, saying: “[T]he citizenship SSA maintains merely represents a snapshot of the individual’s citizenship status at the time of their interaction with SSA. SSA’s records do not provide definitive information about an individual’s citizenship status.”
The Trump administration has provided few public details about how the administration is implementing these changes to SAVE or facilitating the partnership with SSA. DHS and SSA made these changes without either agency first publishing an updated System of Records Notice (SORN), which is required by the Privacy Act of 1974 before making any substantive changes. After a lawsuit challenged the failure to comply with these requirements, DHS and SSA each published a SORN and opened a public comment period but did not pause implementation of the system to respond to concerns raised by thousands of commenters.
According to DHS documents, SAVE queries that are run using SSNs will not go through SAVE’s required “additional verification” process. Additional verification involves escalating cases to a USCIS team of manual reviewers, who are able to review additional records and check for any discrepancies or typos that might prevent SAVE from producing an accurate response. By halting this manual review process for the many queries that use only an SSN, DHS will leave voters subject to an unreliable initial SAVE result that was never intended to represent a final answer on citizenship status.
Taken together, these changes to SAVE—and the many questions left unanswered by the Trump administration about accuracy, data reliability, and procedure—raise the specter that state election officials will be given inaccurate or incomplete citizenship information. Eligible voters are put at risk in at least two ways:
How will state officials react if SAVE queries SSA data and reports that an individual is not a citizen? This result is likely to ensnare naturalized citizens who did not update their citizenship status with SSA after naturalizing.
What conclusions will USCIS, DOGE, or state and local election officials draw from the absence of information in response to a SAVE query? This absence of SSA data is most likely to impact voters who received an SSN before SSA began collecting citizenship data in the 1970s. The disregard for additional verification procedures means that failed initial verifications will be the last word for voters subjected to an SSN-query. Will election officials then ignore the voter’s registration application attesting to citizenship because they don’t find any information using SAVE?
More and more state and local election agencies are signing agreements to use SAVE since Trump took office. The DHS notice also announced plans “in the foreseeable future” to integrate data from “state driver’s licensing agencies and national agencies that store driver’s license information for legal purposes in order to “allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship.” These potential additions raise further concerns about the use of unreliable and outdated data to put eligible voters at risk.
The SAVE system is not an appropriate tool to facilitate rejecting voter registration applications or to conduct voter list maintenance activities, especially in light of the other safeguards in place to ensure that only citizens are voting. Virtually all available evidence shows that in U.S. elections, overwhelmingly, only eligible U.S. citizens are voting.
Advocates and journalists need to ensure the transparency of system changes to the greatest extent possible.
The ways states interpret the retooled SAVE system’s results should be closely scrutinized to ensure these new processes do not make it harder for eligible voters to vote.
Report Last Updated: July 2025