Leftists Lament Federal Database but Shrug Off Noncitizen Voting

When election security and the right to privacy collide, which one has the right of way? That’s the conundrum between two conflicting ideas in the news this week – but it may not be as simple a question as the headlines imply. The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request for an emergency stay, temporarily halting the DC district court ruling from June that blocked the SAVE database from being used to prevent noncitizen voting.

Meanwhile, that threat of noncitizen voting seems much more real after Reuters reported on Wednesday that over 30,000 self-declared noncitizens “may” have been registered to vote in at least a dozen states since 2000. The left, of course, was up in arms over the invasion of privacy and the much smaller number of false positives so far discovered in the SAVE results, yet continues to shrug off the threat of noncitizen voting as negligible and inconsequential to actual election results. Why the outrage over one “glitch” but not the other?

Citizens Only, Please

The Supreme Court granted the administration’s request for emergency relief 6-3, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Last year, the Trump administration revamped the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system – a DHS database that allows states and municipalities to verify citizenship and immigration status to determine eligibility for public benefits – so that states could upload their voter rolls and the federal government could match voter registrations to actual citizenship status.

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In June, District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote” and shut it down. The Supreme Court said Friday the plaintiffs’ claims that the administration broke the law “likely lack merit,” and that the lower court’s ruling would probably be reversed.

In her dissent, Justice Jackson argued: “[T]he 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.” In any case, the Trump administration is temporarily free from Sooknanan’s order and may well be clear of it entirely soon enough.

Noncitizen Voting – Negligible, or Negligence?

On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that “software glitches and clerical errors” in state DMV systems could have caused more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens to be registered to vote since 2000.

Yet the left repeats the same refrain we heard at each revelation of illegal voter registration thus far – whether accidental or fraudulent: There is no evidence of widespread election fraud, either through noncitizen voting or some other method.

But it happens. The weasel word here is “widespread.” What qualifies for that category? More than 30,000 doesn’t qualify, apparently.

US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration official who applied to the Supreme Court for relief earlier this month, wrote in his appeal that, since May 2025, the updated SAVE had verified more than 65 million voters across 26 states and had flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens. But how many of those were actual noncitizens? We don’t know yet. There is a case study, however, in Texas. The Lone Star State flagged 2,724 registered voters as potential noncitizens, gave them 30 days to prove their citizenship, and removed those who didn't respond in time. Only about 20% were later verified as citizens and reinstated.

The Knowns and the Great Unknowns

In 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously explained different kinds of knowledge: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Now, what in the world does that mean? There are the things we know we know, the things we know we don’t know, and potentially any number of things we don’t know and haven’t even conceived of yet.

We know that around 65 million voters in 26 states have been verified by SAVE. We know that more than 28,000 were flagged as potential noncitizens. We know that, at least in Texas, only about 20% were later verified as citizens and reinstated. Of all those flagged in the Lone Star State, we know that 117 (4.2%) were referred for investigation of noncitizen voting. We also know that more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens might have been registered to vote by “clerical error” or “glitch” in the last 26 years.

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We know we don’t know how many registered voters aren’t actually eligible to vote, largely for two reasons: Not all states use the SAVE database, and the federal courts had stopped the administration from digging through said database to find out. We also know that we don’t know how often noncitizen voting takes place – either from those 30,000 knowns or the uncountable unknowns that may have been missed. Another thing we know we don’t know is how many of the removed people who didn’t verify their citizenship actually are citizens or how many planned to vote anyway. If one fails to verify voter eligibility, the logical assumption is that it’s because one either isn’t eligible or doesn’t plan to actually vote.

Finally, we don’t even know what else we don’t know regarding what other mistakes may have been made – either accidentally or by design. More than 30,000 people seem to have slipped through the cracks in the last quarter century, and we’re only just now seeing a multistate tally reported – what else have we missed? With a blind spot in the tens of thousands, just how comforting is the word “widespread”?

Violating the privacy of Americans isn’t a good thing. But is that what’s really happening here? How much privacy from the government is one entitled to when it comes to government records? If, indeed, American citizens are losing the right to vote, that is bad – especially if they aren’t getting it back. But again, is that what’s really going on?

Now, what of the other side of this coin? What about the tens of thousands of potentially ineligible voters who have been discovered – or perhaps many more yet hidden? How many have actually voted? Again, we don’t know. But what we do know is that whenever ineligible voters cast ballots, it muddies the waters and violates the rights of everyone else.