The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to restart its effort to create a nationwide database of purportedly eligible voters, setting aside a lower court ruling which found likely privacy and accuracy problems with the database.

The unsigned order from the court’s conservative majority allowed the administration to move forward on expanding the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system maintained by the Department of Homeland Security to include Social Security and other information on every American. 

The order set aside a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit which paused the changes, and said the database could be used to check voter eligibility ahead of the midterms.

“The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the Supreme Court decision said, referring to the appeals court ruling. 

The order also noted that federal law prohibits mass alterations to voter rolls in the weeks leading up to the election, which “limits the potential impact” of the SAVE system for this election.

However, the decision noted that states could still conduct individualized searches of the database ahead of the midterms.

The alterations to the database stems from Trump’s March 2025 executive order entitled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” Previously the SAVE system included only information about immigrants and naturalized citizens, but the administration sought to combine that with other government records and allow mass searches of the system.

Lower courts, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, paused that effort over concerns it would violate federal privacy and administrative law.

Friday’s order drew a dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. 

Jackson argued that the lower court correctly found that altering the system, created in 1986 to check immigrants’ citizenship status, would violate federal law. She also pointed out that altering the system to allow mass searches made it more likely to result in disenfranchising naturalized citizens.

“In my view, however, 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,” Jackson wrote.

Other portions of the March 2025 order, including requiring proof of citizenship nationwide to register to vote, have been blocked by lower courts.

For months, experts have raised concerns about the accuracy of the data in the database, and the possibility it could be used to purge otherwise eligible voters.

The database’s alteration is separate from another executive order issued in March of this year, entitled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” Earlier this month the Supreme Court blocked a U.S. Postal Service rule created as part of that order, which would restrict mail voting.