On Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States sided with a federal database over the voters it can wrongly flag. In an unsigned order, over the dissent of three justices (NBC News reports a 6-3 split), the Court paused a federal judge's ruling and cleared the Trump administration to go back to using its overhauled SAVE citizenship-verification system to help states check voters (NBC News; SCOTUSblog). Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (Supreme Court opinion).

After a March 2025 executive order, the administration rebuilt SAVE, a tool built to check applicants for public benefits. The new version pulls in Social Security records and lets officials run bulk searches (Supreme Court opinion; SCOTUSblog). The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the overhaul violated federal privacy law, the Social Security Act, and the law that governs federal agencies. She wrote that the government "has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote" (SCOTUSblog).

The majority said the challengers likely have standing but that "their claims likely lack merit." It pointed to a 1996 immigration law that, in its reading, lets DHS get citizenship information from Social Security (SCOTUSblog). The majority's own standing analysis rested on a Louisiana voter who is a naturalized citizen, even though her Social Security records don't show it (Supreme Court opinion). That is the whole problem. When the government's data is wrong, the burden of fixing it falls on the citizen.

This has already hurt real people. Justice Jackson noted the district court's finding that in Texas, one of the challengers' members "had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge," and two more had to prove their citizenship to stay registered (Supreme Court opinion). Democracy Docket reported that the system checked more than 67 million registered voters before the June order, and that most of the people it flagged turned out to be eligible (Democracy Docket).

I spent years as a travel ICU nurse. We checked the chart twice because one bad record can hurt a person. You fix the record. You don't make the patient prove she exists.

The National Voter Registration Act requires states to finish any program that systematically removes ineligible voters at least 90 days before a federal election. The majority said that moratorium "limits the potential impact" of its order, but it stressed that individualized inquiries are still permitted during this period (Supreme Court opinion). Votebeat reports that the ruling isn't expected to cause widespread removals before November. Individual checks can continue now, and broader use can restart after the election (Votebeat). Justice Jackson put the stakes plainly: "the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences" (Supreme Court opinion).

The Brennan Center's review of the research cites Rutgers political scientist Lorraine Minnite, who concluded that noncitizen voting is "extremely rare." The Center's 2017 study of the 2016 election found about 30 suspected cases out of 23.5 million votes in the jurisdictions it studied (Brennan Center). NBC reported that Texas ran more than 18 million registrations through SAVE, and just three people have been charged with voting illegally as noncitizens (NBC News). Power is building a master list to solve a problem the evidence says barely exists.

I have seen no sourced report that Delaware is using the modified system. Don't wait to find out. Check your registration now. The Delaware Department of Elections lists Saturday, October 10, 2026, as the registration deadline for the general election, and early voting runs October 22 through November 1 (Delaware Department of Elections).

I wrote tonight's letter on what this means for you and how to check your registration: Check Your Registration.

I don't take Super PAC money, because the people who buy elections are the same people who profit when fewer of us vote. Register by October 10. On November 3, write TRAVIS JACK STEVENS.

November 3 - write TRAVIS JACK STEVENS - travisjackstevens.com

This campaign is people-funded, with no Super PAC money.