The SAVE system voter rolls audit tool that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is urging states to adopt has a documented history of falsely flagging U.S. citizens as non-citizens, with one state finding that more than 60 percent of individuals the system identified could not be confirmed as ineligible voters.
Mullin on Friday pressed state election officials to “scrub” their registration lists, claiming that 250,000 non-citizens are registered to vote across four states. But the DHS voter roll audit method relies on Social Security Administration data that the SSA itself conveys does not provide “definitive information about an individual’s citizenship status.”
How the SAVE System Works—and Where It Fails
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements was originally built to help government agencies verify immigration status for benefits eligibility. Before 2025, the system was restricted to querying known immigrants, non-citizens, and naturalized citizens against DHS data to confirm their status.
The Trump administration expanded the SAVE system last year to permit bulk searches of state voter rolls using Social Security numbers and SSA data, enabling broader verification of all registered voters, including natural-born citizens. But that expansion carried a critical limitation that even the administration acknowledged in a USCIS fact sheet since removed from the agency website: “SAVE may not be able to confirm U.S. citizenship for an individual who is not designated as a U.S. citizen in SSA records.”
The fact sheet instructed states they must “take additional steps when required by SAVE for any case response other than ‘United States Citizen'” before removing someone from the voter rolls—a caveat that effectively acknowledges the system cannot be used as a standalone purge tool.
The SSA’s own records contain significant gaps that undermine voter roll accuracy. In response to a 2023 subpoena, the agency wrote that its citizenship data “merely represents a snapshot of the individual’s citizenship status at the time of their interaction with SSA.” Naturalized citizens who fail to proactively update their status with SSA remain incorrectly categorized as non-citizens in the database indefinitely.
A 2006 audit of SSA data found that seven percent of number holders classified as non-citizens were actually U.S. citizens who had never updated their records. That seemingly small percentage translated to 3.3 million Americans falsely identified as non-citizens. The Brennan Center for Justice notes that SSA only began collecting citizenship information for all applicants in 1978, meaning Americans born before that year likely have incomplete or absent citizenship data in the system.
States Find Widespread Inaccuracies in DHS Voter Roll Audit
States that cooperated with DHS to verify their voter rolls using the expanded SAVE system discovered significant accuracy problems. Utah conducted a comprehensive citizenship review using SAVE in 2025, running more than 71,000 records through the system. The initial assessment flagged nearly 9,000 people who could not be confirmed as citizens.
A subsequent manual review revealed a starkly different picture. Over 5,600 of those flagged individuals were confirmed as citizens. Another 5,000 could not be confirmed either way. Only 27 records were verified as non-citizens, with another 25 considered “likely non-citizens.” The SAVE system’s initial flag produced a false positive rate exceeding 62 percent when measured against confirmed non-citizen registrations.
In Texas, former Secretary of State Jane Nelson raised concerns about SAVE’s accuracy directly to USCIS. In an April letter obtained by Votebeat Texas through a public records request, Nelson wrote that her office had identified 2,724 possible non-citizens and that county investigations into those individuals were ongoing. But she cautioned: “We want to make sure that you are using the most accurate data.” County voter registrars had observed problems with the system’s outputs, according to Nelson’s correspondence.
Conflicting Court Rulings Create Legal Uncertainty
The administration’s expansion of SAVE is currently entangled in contradictory federal court decisions. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found this summer that the expansion violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act, blocking its use. The court noted that some states have been “actively removing” citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information provided through the system.
Weeks later, a federal judge in Florida ordered the government to continue providing access to the expanded SAVE system to four states. The Department of Justice told the D.C. court earlier this month that the government is working to comply with both orders and has restored access only to states subject to the conflicting Florida ruling.
The League of Women Voters, in a reply brief seeking enforcement of the D.C. court’s earlier order, alleged that DHS was still using the system despite the injunction—citing Thursday’s White House report as evidence of ongoing noncompliance.
It remains unclear whether DHS used the SAVE system to produce its claim of 250,000 non-citizen registered voters across four states. In his remarks to reporters on Friday, Markwayne Mullin did not explain the methodology behind that figure. DHS referred detailed questions about the report back to a Friday social media post from Mullin, and the White House referred questions to DHS.
What Happens Next
The conflicting court rulings will likely require resolution by an appellate court, leaving states in legal limbo as they attempt to comply with DHS directives while avoiding voter roll purges that could violate federal law. States that act on SAVE system data risk removing eligible citizens from their registration lists—a scenario the D.C. court has already warned is occurring.
The accuracy gap between SAVE’s initial flags and manual review results raises fundamental questions about the system’s fitness for voter roll maintenance. If Utah’s experience is representative, the vast majority of individuals flagged by SAVE will prove to be citizens or remain unclassifiable, requiring costly manual verification that may exceed the administrative capacity of county election offices nationwide.
Mullin’s threat to withhold aid from states that don’t comply with DHS election directives intensifies the pressure on an already fraught legal landscape. States must now choose between following federal directives that depend on a system with known accuracy problems and waiting for judicial clarity that could take months or years to materialize—potentially past the next federal election cycle.
— Omar Hassan, politics desk, AXO News