The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Trump administration can deploy an expansive online system that combines citizenship information, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data about millions of Americans, allowing states to use it to hunt for ineligible voters.
Critics fear that states could use the system to purge large numbers of valid voters from their rolls ahead of the midterm elections.
The decision is a win for President Trump, who has pressed his administration to find evidence of widespread noncitizen voting, even though such instances are exceedingly rare. However, states are not required to use the federal system and it remains to be seen how much enthusiasm there will be among local and state election officials for it, as it has mistakenly flagged U.S. citizens as noncitizens in past searches.
The majority concluded that a lower-court ruling that had blocked the Trump administration from rolling out the system was improper because it inhibited “the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”
The emergency ruling was unsigned and gave no vote count, but the court’s three liberal justices joined in dissent. In a 12-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized that the majority’s decision created the conditions for some states to cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or to force them to provide proof of citizenship before voting.
“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The federal administration’s efforts to create a national citizenship list have manifested a longstanding goal of Mr. Trump’s. The administration has argued that a centralized database will help the government work more effectively.
Critics such as libertarians, privacy groups and immigrant rights associations who sued to block the efforts have said that assembling so much information in one place gives the government too much power to target opponents of the administration and could be a national security vulnerability.
Federal law establishes a 90-day “quiet period” before elections, in which wide-scale changes to state voter rolls cannot be made. The provision is meant to avert last-minute chaos in elections, and is expected to prevent states from kicking large numbers of voters off their rolls in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 3 election, experts said.
In the order, the majority wrote that the 90-day rule “limits the potential impact” of the court’s action. However, the majority added that states should have the ability to use the federal system to make inquiries about voters on a case-by-case basis.
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Still, a coalition of groups who had challenged the expanded online system, including the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a statement that the ruling was “profoundly disappointing” and had put “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.”
The decision came after the justices had dealt the administration a major setback this month, when the court’s majority blocked the government’s plan to require the Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots.
That loss frustrated Mr. Trump, who assailed the court in a social media post, accusing it of “shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”
In March 2025, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing several federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, to pool their records into an online tool that state and local officials could use to verify the citizenship and immigration status of registered voters.
It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Mr. Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that large numbers of noncitizens have managed to register and then illegally vote.
Mr. Trump’s directive prompted the Department of Homeland Security to overhaul the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, which had long been used by local, state and tribal agencies to check the citizenship and immigration status of people seeking some types of benefits and licenses. The expanded system pulled in Social Security data and other records.
Several legal challenges followed, including a lawsuit by voting rights groups.
In June, a federal judge in Washington blocked the Trump administration from allowing states to use the online system to screen their voter rolls.
Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., found that in “scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections,” federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
The court challenge had highlighted tensions among state and local officials over use of the system. Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, a Republican, filed a brief asserting that the state had been able to use it to run checks on more than 18 million Texas voters in a free, efficient way.
Texas officials have said that the new system flagged about 2,700 people as potential noncitizens. A manual review of those names found that 578 were flagged in error and were actually citizens. On Sept. 15, Texas officials announced they would refer 117 names to the attorney general’s office for “investigation of potential noncitizen voting.”
But local officials in Travis County, a Democrat stronghold in the state, filed a brief urging the justices to keep the new system on pause for the midterms. Celia Israel, the county tax assessor, and Dyana Limon-Mercado, the county clerk, both Democrats, cited “grave concerns” about the accuracy of the system, saying that it had “introduced flawed data and will continue to do so, causing eligible voters to be erroneously purged from the rolls.”
Nicholas Nehamas, Ann E. Marimow and Richard Fausset contributed reporting.
