Missouri can continue using a federal database to review voter eligibility after the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily cleared the way for states to use an expanded version of the system to check the citizenship status of registered voters.
The court’s 6-3 emergency order on Friday stayed a federal judge’s ruling that had blocked the expanded use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database. The lower court had found that the federal government’s changes to the system violated federal privacy laws and raised concerns about inaccurate information being used to identify voters as potential noncitizens.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling allows the federal government to continue the revamped SAVE database while the underlying legal challenge proceeds. The court did not issue a final ruling on the merits of the case.
Missouri was among the first states to use the database after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 directing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to establish systems allowing state and local authorities to verify the citizenship status of registered voters.
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins announced in June that his office had “utilized the federal SAVE database to identify approximately 1,000 individuals registered to vote in Missouri that we could not confirm are United States citizens.” The office said it was working with local election authorities and law enforcement to determine whether those individuals were U.S. citizens or noncitizens.
Anne Marie Moy, spokeswoman for the secretary of state, told the Independent Wednesday that the office has sent about 1,000 registered voters letters notifying them that they’ve been flagged as potentially being noncitizens.
Voters were asked to respond directly to local election authorities, May said,“who we work with to act as appropriate.”
The state is unable to comment on how many people have been removed from the rolls during this process because “local election authorities maintain voter records, not the state,” she said.
During a federal court-ordered hearing in April, Nicholas La Strada, who at the time was serving as Hoskins’ director of election integrity, testified that Missouri had already removed more than 300 people he said were not naturalized U.S. citizens after reviewing voter-registration records through SAVE and other databases.
The Supreme Court’s opinion notes that SAVE has existed since 1986, when it was created to allow federal, state and local agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for public benefits. The federal government expanded the system’s use in 2025 to allow states to check voter-registration records.
“The district court’s order thus inhibits the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections,” Friday’s Supreme Court opinion states.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented. Jackson wrote that the expanded system risked disenfranchising lawful voters, including recently naturalized citizens whose citizenship information may not be reflected accurately in federal records.
The case began after the League of Women Voters and other groups challenged the expanded system in federal court. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan barred the federal government from using the expanded SAVE database for voter verification, finding that federal agencies had “haphazardly” combined and repurposed personal information to comply with Trump’s 2025 executive order. The result has been that state governments are “actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote.
Missouri’s SAVE process
Texas and Missouri were among the first states to use the revamped SAVE system to examine voter rolls, according to a February investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The investigation found that Missouri officials acted on SAVE results before fully verifying them.
In November, Missouri sent lists of flagged voters to county election administrators. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained the lists for seven of the state’s 10 most populous counties and found that SAVE initially identified more than 1,200 people in those counties as potential noncitizens.
The Secretary of State’s Office told election administrators it would work to verify the citizenship determinations. In the meantime, local officials were instructed to change the status of flagged voters, temporarily preventing them from voting.
In early December, about 70 county clerks — Republicans and Democrats — sent a letter to Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson saying there were better ways than SAVE to identify and remove noncitizens from voter rolls.
“These lists are deeply flawed: they are outdated, inaccurate, and include individuals we know to be U.S. citizens — our neighbors, colleagues, and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies,” the letter states.
La Strada later testified about Missouri’s use of SAVE during an April 24 hearing in the Missouri Capitol, ordered by federal court in a case challenging the validity of the state’s voter-registration records. That hearing has since become part of a lawsuit La Strada filed after he was fired by Hoskins, alleging retaliation connected in part to his testimony.
La Strada testified that Missouri signed a memorandum of agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in March 2025 to use SAVE, shortly after Trump’s executive order.
“We jumped all over it,” La Strada said. “And that was Secretary Hoskins — one of his number one things he wanted to do.”
By April, La Strada said, the Secretary of State’s Office “already took all of our voter registrations” and “ran it through the SAVE database.”
He called the process labor-intensive and said the office was taking precautions because of the potential consequences for voters.
“We all believe in due process,” La Strada said. “Nothing worse than being blamed for something you haven’t done.”
La Strada said the office was also working with the Missouri Department of Revenue and had learned from how other states were using the database.
“A lot of other states actually purge rolls once they get this back,” he said.
Instead, La Strada said Missouri was sending letters to voters flagged as potential noncitizens and giving them 90 days to respond. The week before the hearing, La Strada said, the office had sent a “substantial amount” of letters to those flagged as potentially being noncitizens.
That would have put the initial response deadline around July, although it remains unclear how many voters were ultimately removed from the rolls as a result of the review.
In July, Hoskins announced that he had led the removal of 280,000 ineligible voters from Missouri’s rolls, including deceased people, noncitizens, felons and people who had moved out of state. He did not provide a separate figure for voters removed because they were determined to be noncitizens.
Moy said the newest number from the start of the Hoskins’ term to today is a little over 296,000.
La Strada testified that the office’s review relied on information from SAVE, the Department of Revenue, property-location data, alien registration numbers and I-94 immigration records.
Moy told The Independent 1,000 letters were sent “based on information provided by the SAVE database as flagged records.”
“All are considered under review,” she said “and given an opportunity to provide proof of citizenship to the local election authority.”
Part of the reason there were so many in question, La Strada said, was that Missouri voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2024 to require all voters to be U.S. citizens. Because of that, there are new voter registration forms and people don’t always remember to check the citizenship box on applications when getting their drivers’ license, for instance.
He said the people who marked “no” or who didn’t mark anything, “those people have not voted. I want to make…that very clear. They did not vote.”
He also acknowledged the database has some flaws.
“Is it perfect?” he said. “No. But it’s fixed up over 300 people as of today that are not naturalized citizens.”
This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent.
