There’s a quiet but important battle going on over who gets to vote in America—and a leading election watchdog is calling on the federal government to step up.
On July 7, 2025, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a nonprofit law firm focused on election integrity, sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
In it, they praised improvements to a little-known federal database called SAVE – short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – and urged her to help get more states using it to keep non-citizens off the voter rolls.
PILF President J. Christian Adams summed it up simply: “Voting is solely a right for American citizens and every effort should be made to preserve it.”
What’s SAVE, and Why Does It Matter?
President Trump issued his March 25, 2025 Executive Order “Preserving and Protecting The Integrity of American Elections”.
Section 2 directed federal agencies to “Enforcing the Citizenship Requirement for Federal Elections”.
The President directed the federal agencies to “make available information from relevant databases to State and local election officials engaged in verifying the citizenship of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.”
The result: DHS rolled out a major upgrade of their SAVE system in the last few months.
According to PILF, these changes took SAVE from “an in-demand system that few state election offices could practically use to a tool that should soon be as commonly relied upon as the Social Security Death Index.”
That’s a big deal. If you’ve ever had a relative pass away and watched government agencies pull their info quickly from that death index, you get the idea: it’s fast, reliable, and helps prevent fraud.
For years, SAVE’s predecessor, HAVV (Help America Vote Verification), was clunky and hard to use:
- The states had to pay for using HAVV – no more. Election departments are now granted free access to SAVE.
- Verification results needed more manual investigations, so it was time consuming.
- Many election officials requested SAVE access, but it fell on deaf ears – no more.
- Now the SAVE application does a dynamic comparison of multiple federal data bases to determine the most up-to-date status of the immigrant – in seconds
- The most impactful change is that data can be uploaded in bulk, no more individual record submissions.
SAVE describes it primary function as: “Verifies a benefit or license applicant’s immigration status or U.S. citizenship, including naturalized or acquired U.S. citizenship, for user agencies within seconds.”
Most states used HAVV and many are transitioning. The Nevada Secretary of State has not yet signed up to use the new SAVE system.
DMV Mistakes and Confusion
One of the biggest concerns raised by PILF is how non-citizens sometimes end up on the voter rolls without even knowing it. Often it happens when they go to the DMV and a clerk or canvasser encourages them to register, even if they’re not eligible.
Because of language barriers, some immigrants don’t realize they’re signing up to vote. Then they get a voter registration card in the mail and assume they’re good to go.
It’s not just theoretical. In 2024, South Dakota’s Secretary of State discovered that a DMV glitch had automatically registered some non-citizens to vote. Thanks to SAVE, they were able to catch the error and fix it.
In Nevada, the Pigpen Project escalated a case in July 2024.
A Permanent Resident, who had lived in the US for decades, and was not a US Citizen, was added to the voter rolls in 2021 a few days after he renewed his car registration online.
The gentleman tried to get his voter registration cancelled and was so frustrated that in 2024 he approached the Pigpen Project to help him get deleted from the voter rolls.
We finally succeeded and he was removed.
“This system helps immigrants, too,” PILF wrote. “Especially those who don’t even realize their info was sent to the voter rolls.”
A Bipartisan Backstory
Though you won’t hear it much in the headlines, the push to use SAVE for elections started under the Obama administration.
Back in 2011, North Carolina officials asked the Justice Department—then run by Eric Holder—for permission to use immigration databases to clean up their voter rolls. They were even guided through the process by then–USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas.
By 2014, North Carolina had flagged over 1,400 suspected non-citizens on their rolls before Election Day. They built procedures to make sure no one voted illegally, while giving people a chance to prove their citizenship if needed.
Now that these significant improvements are in place, PILF says, SAVE should now be the model nationwide.
What’s Next?
In their letter, PILF urged Secretary Noem to treat SAVE’s recent upgrades as the beginning of a long-term project, not a one-and-done improvement. They want the system to be more user-friendly and promoted heavily to election offices in every state.
Opponents of SAVE argue that it could lead to eligible voters being wrongly flagged or discouraged from voting. But supporters say that with proper safeguards, SAVE does the opposite: it protects legal voters by making sure every ballot cast is by a citizen.
PILF says this is about trust.
“If we want Americans to have faith in their elections,” Adams said, “we need to make sure non-citizens aren’t slipping through the cracks.”
This article was written with the assistance of AI. Please verify information and consult additional sources as needed.
