Washington state does not plan to connect to the expanded federal SAVE system for verifying voters’ citizenship, despite a Sept. 25 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowing the Donald Trump administration to use the system again. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs considers the database unreliable, saying its errors could force eligible citizens to prove their right to vote. Olympia will continue relying on its own voter-registration procedures — and in a state where every registered voter receives a ballot by mail, the cost of a mistaken match is especially high.
The Supreme Court’s decision was not a final ruling on the merits of the case. It paused an order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which in June struck down the modernized version of SAVE, finding that federal agencies had moved too quickly to combine and reuse the personal data of millions of Americans. The dispute will now continue on appeal, but while the case proceeds, the Department of Homeland Security may once again offer the system to states and local election officials.
SAVE — short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — has existed since 1986. It was originally a tool for verifying the immigration status of people applying for public benefits. Under Trump, the system acquired a different and far more politically sensitive role. Following a March 2025 executive order, it gained access to additional Social Security Administration data, including information linked to Social Security numbers, as well as the ability to upload lists of people for simultaneous verification.
The mechanism may appear technical, but its consequences are deeply human. If the system fails to confirm someone’s citizenship, a local authority must contact that person and request additional documents so they can register or remain registered. The risk is particularly significant for naturalized Americans: information in different federal databases may be updated with delays. Court filings cited the case of a U.S. citizen whom the system mistakenly flagged as a likely noncitizen; his registration in Texas was temporarily canceled.
The Supreme Court majority found that a federal law requiring agencies to respond to states’ requests about citizenship or immigration status likely permits the use of the modernized SAVE system. The justices also noted that federal law prohibits states from carrying out systematic voter-roll purges in the weeks before an election: such programs must be completed no later than 90 days before federal primaries or general elections. Individual checks, however, remain permissible during that period — which is what made the ruling so important to the administration.
The court’s three liberal justices, however, saw the decision as a hasty expansion of federal authority. In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized that the lower court had already found that Social Security databases may contain inaccurate citizenship information and that the new data-sharing rules had been introduced without proper public notice and comment. The dispute, therefore, concerns not only the fight against illegal voting — which is already a crime — but also how far the federal government may go in turning administrative records into a tool of election oversight.
For Washington, the conflict adds to a longstanding dispute with the federal government. In September 2025, the Justice Department demanded the state’s complete, unredacted voter database, including sensitive personal information. Hobbs refused to provide dates of birth, driver’s-license numbers and the last digits of Social Security numbers, supplying only information available to the public. On Sept. 22, a federal court in Seattle dismissed the government’s lawsuit, ruling that the demand was unlawful. In the spring, the state also strengthened protections for such data: disclosure by an election official can result in criminal penalties.
Hobbs says Washington already regularly checks and updates its voter rolls without SAVE. His office also cites a figure intended to return the debate to its actual scale: from 1982 through 2025, the state identified 15 cases of noncitizens voting — 0.000006% of all ballots cast. Supporters of the federal system see it as a way to detect violations more quickly; Washington officials see the risk that searching for a rare problem will create a new one — depriving someone of a vote they are fully entitled to cast. With the Nov. 3 election approaching, the state appears to have made its choice: The federal database may once again be available, but it will not be used here.
Based on: Hobbs says WA won’t use Trump’s ‘flawed’ SAVE voter database