On March 25, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order #14248 “Preserving and Protecting The Integrity of American Elections.”
Section 2 directed federal agencies to “Enforcing the Citizenship Requirement for Federal Elections.”
DHS-USCIS (Department of Homeland Security – US Citizenship and Immigration Services) responded quickly by rolling out, in July 2025, a major upgrade of their voter verification functionality in the SAVE system – short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.
The SAVE website clarifies: “SAVE verifies immigration status but does not provide determinations regarding an applicant’s eligibility for a specific benefit or license. Only the benefit-granting agencies can make eligibility determinations.”
The SAVE Program has been used for years by about 1200 federal and state agencies.
Among these benefit-granting agencies are : health-related benefits, housing assistance, unemployment insurance, food stamp (SNAP) benefits, workers compensation, voter verification and more.…
A recap of the initial voter verification functions of SAVE, rolled out in July 2025:
- States and agencies can use SAVE for free to verify new registrants, saving states $millions
- Voter data can be uploaded in bulk, significantly streamlining and speeding up the process
- The SAVE system provides dynamic comparisons of multiple existing federal data bases to determine the most up-to-date status of the immigrant – in seconds
New capabilities that are now functional:
- Integration with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and case submission using the full 9 digit SSN#
- Access to SSA Death Master File (DMF) that expands capability for states to access more timely information and eliminating state workload
- Auto-escalation for Non-US Citizens (USC) cases to ensure manual review of case responses
- Manual searches for the Department of State (DoS) to determine US Citizenship to augment research capabilities
- Integration with DoS to determine US Citizen Births and Deaths Abroad
- Not yet ready, but close: Enable case submission using US Passport #
What is the scuttlebutt on using this system?
Last year the SAVE system processed about 6 million requests for voter eligibility.
So far this year close to 47 million requests have been processed!
And 24 states and 71 agencies have an agreement with SAVE to process voter verifications.
However, critics discourage the use of the SAVE system by claiming that personal voter information is being created and stored by the federal government. But that is not true.
In actuality, SAVE aggregates point-in-time immigration status to the agency requesting the information. The data is sent to the local agency who then determines the immigration status and eligibility for the benefit it is verifying.
Only government agencies can enter into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with SAVE, so the personal voter information is kept confidential.
DHS Secretary Kristie Noem has recently sent letters to the Secretaries of State in all the states promoting the recently added SAVE functions.
What about Nevada?
Nevada is among the remaining states that have not signed on to using SAVE for voter verification.
It would speed up verification of new registrants.
It would help with deleting deceased voters from the voter rolls faster.
It would save Nevada money and reduce the potential for voter fraud.
So why is this new state of the art functionality being ignored by the Nevada election officials?
Are they concerned that the data is not accurate?
Maybe a proof of concept in a few of our counties would be a good start?
Let’s get going Nevada!
