SAN ANTONIO – The Supreme Court is allowing states to resume using a federal citizenship database to check voter eligibility before the November mid-terms.
Justices say the federal government has an obligation to respond to state and local requests seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.
SAVE, which stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, has been used in President Trumps crackdown on non-citizen voting.
A federal judge had blocked its use, saying it violates voter privacy and could lead to wrongful voter purges.
That federal citizenship database was made available to states for the first time last year.
Texas used it to remove some non-citizen names from the voter rolls.
The News 4 I-Team has been tracking the impact here in Bexar County.
The Texas Secretary of State’s office compared its state voter list to that federal citizenship database last year before a judge put a stop to the practice this summer.
That comparison identified 2,724 potential non-citizen voters statewide, and individual counties were told to verify citizenship.
Here in Bexar County 201 voters were sent letters asking them to confirm they were citizens.
20 were confirmed to be non-citizens.
180 did not respond within 30 days and their registrations were canceled.
1 person was verified as a citizen eligible to vote.
The 2,724 potential non-citizens identified using that federal database is a tiny fraction of the 18 million registered voters in Texas.
Last year after cross-checking that database the Secretary of State’s office referred 33 individuals to the Attorney General’s office for allegedly voting illegally in the November 2024 election.
There won’t be any more names removed anytime soon because election law prohibits any purging of names from the voter rolls within 90 days of an election.