The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to take up a case in which the Republican National Committee is targeting a number of Democrats and voting rights groups over voting restrictions in Arizona. (Photo by Jim Small/Arizona Mirror)
The Trump administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to authorize states to audit their voter rolls for non-citizens just days before the election, a change that voting rights advocates say risks disenfranchising Americans.
The US Justice Department on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to wade get into a legal dispute between the Republican National Committee and a variety of Democratic and voting rights groups over a series of voting restrictions in Arizona.
If the court accepts the case, it could lead to a significant decision that gives states more leeway to exclude supposedly non-citizen voters close to elections and require voters to prove their citizenship – a key goal of the SAVE America Act, the election law signed by President Donald Trump that has stalled in Congress.
The Supreme Court’s decision could come before the 2028 presidential election.
Vote in Arizona
Arizona requires individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to vote in state elections. Residents who do not provide documentation can still register with a federal form, but are only allowed to vote in federal elections.
Election officials must run the names of federal-only voters through a U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizens.
The Justice Department argues that the Supreme Court should uphold Arizona’s law and find that it does not violate the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 federal law that sets rules for how voters are registered and when states can remove them from their voter rolls. The NVRA sets strict limits on canceling registrations in the 90 days before a federal election.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that Arizona law violates the NVRA.
“But this decision eliminates the flexibility the law promises states in enforcing their voter qualifications,” the Justice Department says in its miniature version.
While the Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to take up the case, the underlying petition was filed by the Republican National Committee. Its chairman, Joe Gruters, said in a statement that it was “unacceptable” that the RNC still had to defend Arizona’s law.
“Federal law is clear: Only U.S. citizens have the right to vote in American elections,” Gruters said.
Judgment of the Court of Appeal
Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group that is opposing the RNC in court, said in a statement that the Justice Department’s letter shows: “MAGA Republicans and their friends in the Trump administration are once again trying to disenfranchise Latino voters in Arizona.”
Opponents of Arizona’s law argue that the 9th Circuit’s decision was correct. They say the state law goes far beyond what is allowed under the NVRA. Election officials can remove individual voters in the run-up to an election under certain circumstances, but the law prohibits sweeping purges.
“States cannot circumvent the restrictions on systematic removals that Congress—in exercising its express constitutional authority to regulate federal elections—established to ensure that eligible voters have sufficient time to correct flawed removal procedures, upholding Americans’ fundamental right to vote,” the Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party argued shortly filed on Tuesday.
Democrats and voting rights groups warn against this Expansion of apply the Homeland Security SAVE system, miniature for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, required by Arizona law.
Originally, it was a program used by states to verify whether individual non-citizens were eligible for federal benefits. The Trump administration has now revamped it into a tool to verify citizenship by checking information in federal databases.
SAVE can now check millions of names simultaneously. Many Republican states have begun uploading their voter lists to SAVE to screen for potential non-citizens.
Critics of the program say SAVE has falsely flagged U.S. citizens, a problem that could worsen if the Supreme Court allows its widespread apply in the weeks before an election. Last-minute misidentifications could leave voters with little time to prove their citizenship.
Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said in an interview that the 90-day period serves as a “pencil put down” period to minimize the possibility of errors close to elections.
“Any time you map one giant list to another giant list, mistakes are going to happen,” Levitt said. “If you carry out this systematic list maintenance two days before the election, these errors will deter eligible voters from voting.”
Voter purges
In a US House of Representatives NVRA Hearing In December, Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, pointed to several voter purges, including a 2024 effort in Virginia, to highlight the dangers of last-minute impeachments.
In August of that year, then-Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin ordered election officials to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens. More than 1,600 voter registrations were canceled and citizens were affected by the purge. The Supreme Court declined to overturn the purge in October 2024.
“There is no doubt that states and localities must keep their voter rolls accurate and up-to-date,” Lakin wrote in her opening statement. “But the integrity of our elections is not threatened by the phantom threat of widespread non-citizen voting – it is threatened by aggressive purge practices that unfairly remove legitimate voters from voter rolls, and by unnecessary barriers to registration that prevent eligible Americans from getting on those voter rolls in the first place.”
Non-citizen election
The specter of non-citizen voting has been at the heart of Trump’s second term, although studies show it is an extremely uncommon event. One study In the 2016 elections, the prevalence of non-citizen voting was 0.0001% of votes cast.
Utah recently announced that a review of its 2 million registered voters identified only 27 confirmed non-citizens and another 25 “probable” non-citizens – a diminutive percentage of the electorate.
The Ministry of Justice has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia in a so-far unsuccessful attempt to force them to release private voter data so that the information can be run through the SAVE system to search for non-citizens. In overdue March, Trump signed an executive order restricting the delivery of ballots by mail, despite multiple lawsuits filed against it.
Trump too still asked that senators pass the SAVE America Act even though it is stalled in the U.S. Senate. While the legislation would establish a national requirement for proof of citizenship, some states have adopted or are currently considering their own requirements.
Republican Attorneys General
Five states – Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, New Hampshire and South Dakota – require proof of citizenship upon initial voter registration. accordingly the National Conference of State Legislatures. One state, Wyoming, also requires proof when voters update their registration.
But Arizona was the only state before 2025 to maintain two separate voter rolls to enforce its proof-of-citizenship rules. accordingly the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The distinction helps explain why the Arizona case is now up for consideration by the Supreme Court.
A number of Republican attorneys general, led by Kris Kobach of Kansas, have filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to take up the Arizona case. They say the 9th Circuit has gutted Arizona’s “common sense measures” to protect its elections.
“This case represents another attack on the state’s efforts to promote election security,” the state’s statement said.
In addition to Kansas, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia also signed the order.
The Supreme Court has sent mixed signals on citizenship proof laws in the past. In August 2024 the court issued an unsigned order on his “shadow act” allowing Arizona to enforce its proof of citizenship requirements for the 2024 election.
But four years earlier, the justices declined to take a case over a Kansas citizenship certificate. This left an appeals court decision that blocked the law and remains unenforceable.
The Arizona case would provide the Supreme Court with an opportunity to issue a more definitive opinion. If the justices decide to do so soon, they would likely hear oral arguments in the fall and possibly make a decision next spring, more than a year before the 2028 presidential election.
The Justice Department’s brief says the case “provides an opportunity to resolve these important election law issues outside the context of a contested election.”
