Supreme Court amicus: Arizona SAVE database verification violates National Voter Registration Act

Arizona cannot carry out its program to cancel voter registrations in the weeks before an election based on the Trump administration’s inaccurate SAVE database, according to an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in RNC vs. Mi Familia Vota by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Jenner and Block LLP. The Court must enforce the 90-day quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act, which freezes voter list maintenance within 90 days of an election, to prevent the erroneous removal of eligible voters.

According to Arizona law, election officials must perform monthly checks of the state’s voter rolls against the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database to verify the citizenship status of registered voters. When Arizona passed this law in 2022, SAVE had a narrow reach. In 2025, however, the Trump administration changed SAVE’s scope by secretly linking it to Social Security Administration records, extending its reach to more than 300 million people, including U.S.-born citizens. Since DHS modified SAVE, it has conceded that, due to “shortfalls in data accuracy,” the system cannot reliably confirm citizenship for citizens born outside of the United States. Because of those inaccuracies, multiple U.S. citizens have been wrongfully purged from voting rolls. In Yavapai County, Arizona, the County Recorder encountered a 72 percent error rate while using SAVE to identify purported noncitizens.

The National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from conducting systematic removals of ineligible voters from their state voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election to protect against accidental disenfranchisement. Because of the inaccuracies in the SAVE database, there is a high risk that eligible voters incorrectly identified as noncitizens will not be able to correct the error in the weeks before the election. Using SAVE during the quiet period also increases the chances that sensitive data is improperly released.

If Arizona election officials continue to perform voter verification using the SAVE database, they risk preventing eligible voters from casting a ballot in the upcoming midterm elections. The Supreme Court can and must enforce the NVRA’s 90-day quiet period to prevent this from occurring.