On September 25, 2026 — six weeks before the midterm elections — the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to let the Department of Homeland Security resume running voter citizenship checks through its expanded federal database. The unsigned emergency order lifted a federal judge’s June ruling that had blocked the program, clearing DHS to use the SAVE system for “individualized inquiries” into voters’ citizenship.
SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — was built in 1986 to check immigration status for benefits, not ballots. Last year the administration rebuilt it into something much bigger: Social Security records, passport data, driver’s license files, all fused into one federal citizenship database, with states allowed to run bulk searches. A lower court found the overhaul likely violated federal privacy and Social Security data laws — that case is still alive, working its way through the courts.
Now here’s the part both sides are screaming past each other on.
The Right Is Right About One Thing
Only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections. That’s not controversial — it’s the law, and it should stay the law. And this isn’t theoretical: in New Jersey, a software error in the state motor-voter system auto-registered roughly 6,600 people who indicated they were non-citizens, and state officials confirmed about 400 of them cast ballots. If that doesn’t bother you, you’re not serious about election integrity.
The Left Is Right About One Thing Too
The SAVE database is error-prone — DHS itself has acknowledged its results aren’t always accurate — and the challengers in this case called it a recklessly built “error-laden master citizenship database.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, warned that running it this close to an election risks mistakenly stripping eligible citizens of their vote: “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences.”
Think about who gets flagged by a glitchy federal database: naturalized citizens. Women who changed their names after marriage. Young voters. Veterans with messy paperwork. Real Americans, losing their vote six weeks before the midterms because a computer said so.
What the 99% Actually Want
Here’s what I believe, and I don’t need a party to tell me:
One — only citizens vote. States should verify citizenship — with accurate systems, maintained year-round, not a federal dragnet spun up weeks before Election Day.
Two — no eligible voter gets purged by a database error. Anyone flagged gets individual notice and a real chance to prove up before anything happens to their registration. The 90-day federal ban on mass purges before an election stays — the Court kept that protection in place, and it should.
Three — fix the rolls in March, not October. If we did the boring work of clean voter rolls all year, nobody would need a last-minute federal citizenship dragnet — and nobody would fear one.
One side wants the database with no safeguards. The other side wants no checks at all. The 99% want both: a vote that counts, and a vote that can’t be stolen — by a non-citizen or by a glitch.
I’m Alexander Heidenreich. I’m for the 99 — every legal vote counted, every legal voter protected.
Paid for by Alexander J.S. Heidenreich for Congress.