Two federal courts struck down separate Trump administration voter citizenship verification efforts within the same week this June, and the wins for plaintiffs came with an asterisk neither side has fully reckoned with.
Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, sitting on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, vacated the administration’s overhaul of the SAVE database, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, finding that repurposing it from benefits verification to voter roll citizenship checking violated the Social Security Act’s disclosure prohibitions, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
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Two days later, Judge Denise Jefferson Casper in Boston permanently barred enforcement of the president’s proof-of-citizenship executive order, converting her 2025 preliminary injunction into a permanent ban. Her reasoning was direct: the Constitution’s elections clause assigns federal election administration authority to states and Congress, not the executive. Both rulings are legally defensible. Neither rules out citizenship verification as a policy objective.
That’s where the SAVE America Act comes in. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration. The House passed it 218-213 in February. What the two court rulings establish is that statute, not executive order, is the only durable path. An executive order gets enjoined. A statute grounded in Congress’s explicit constitutional authority over federal elections does not.
Here’s what those rulings don’t fix. The Senate has had two chances this year to pass citizenship verification into law, and both times it died as someone else’s amendment rather than a vote on its own merits. In April, Sen. John Kennedy’s (R-LA) voter ID amendment attaching SAVE-style verification to the GOP’s reconciliation bill failed 48-50, with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) joining Democrats. In June, a version attached to the Department of Homeland Security funding package failed again on the floor. Neither was an up-or-down vote on the bill the House actually passed. Both let senators who oppose citizenship verification cast their defection as a vote about something else, immigration funding or budget reconciliation, never the provision itself.
The Fifteenth Amendment guarantees that the right to vote shall not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It says nothing about noncitizens because it didn’t need to. The Constitution’s voting provisions were written on the assumption that citizenship was the threshold. The Fifteenth Amendment extended the franchise across racial lines within that threshold; it didn’t eliminate the threshold itself. Noncitizen voting is not a constitutional right. Protecting the franchise from noncitizen dilution is not voter suppression. Those two propositions aren’t complicated, but they’ve been deliberately conflated.
Prosecutors have already built the record that undercuts the claim that noncitizen voting is negligible. Cases are pending against noncitizens who voted or registered to vote in New Jersey, New York, Florida, Alabama, and Michigan in recent election cycles: two men in Bergen County, New Jersey charged with voting as aliens; an Iraqi national in Saratoga County, New York charged with illegally voting in 2020; a man in Pinellas County, Florida charged with submitting more than 100 fraudulent voter registrations; two Ukrainian women on nonimmigrant visas charged with voting in 2024; and an Alabama man who voted in both 2016 and 2020 under an assumed identity. These are indictments, not allegations.
There’s also an apportionment dimension that this debate rarely covers honestly. Congressional seats and electoral votes are allocated by total population, including noncitizens. States with large noncitizen populations gain representation they’d otherwise not have. The incentive for those states’ senators to resist citizenship verification isn’t ideological. It’s arithmetical.
OPINION: THEY SAID NONCITIZEN VOTING WAS A MYTH. MEET THE DEFENDANTS
The current system, to be direct about it, is not a system. It’s a form. Applicants check a box affirming citizenship. Registration clerks have no authority and no mechanism to verify it. In my work advising financial institutions on fiduciary compliance, a process this thin wouldn’t survive a cursory audit. We apply a lower verification standard to the franchise than to opening a brokerage account.
Both rulings point toward the same fix. The SAVE America Act would close the gap, but a bill that dies twice as someone else’s amendment never gets the recorded vote the legislative process is supposed to produce. The next attempt needs to be a stand-alone vote on the bill the House has already passed, not another rider buried in a funding fight where defection is invisible. The courts told Congress to act. Congress has tried to act without anyone having to answer for it. That’s not the same thing.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
