League of Women Voters, EPIC Urge Court to Protect Privacy and Voting Rights by Reversing Illegal Overhaul of SAVE System

Yesterday, EPIC and a coalition of plaintiffs led by the League of Women Voters urged the court to enter summary judgement in their lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful consolidation and misuse of citizenship data by the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration. The plaintiffs are represented by counsel from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Democracy Forward, and Fair Elections Center.

In May 2025, the DHS illegally repurposed a benefits verification system, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), to pull personal data from other government databases for voter eligibility, including unreliable citizenship data from SSA. The DHS has encouraged states to use the overhauled SAVE system for bulk citizenship checks to verify eligible voters, open investigations, and purge voter rolls.

In their motion, the plaintiffs explained that the overhauled SAVE system has caused real harm by inflicting widespread privacy violations and falsely identifying a significant number of eligible voters as non-citizens. This has caused numerous citizens to be wrongfully removed from voter rolls and some even to be disenfranchised from voting in Texas’s March 2026 primary election. Thousands of Texas and Louisiana voters have already faced the threat of investigation and removal from voter rolls due to errors in the overhauled SAVE system.

The plaintiffs asked the court to order the agency to stop using the overhauled SAVE system, revert the changes to the overhauled SAVE system, delete any unlawfully obtained data, and terminate any memoranda of understanding for the overhauled system. The plaintiffs also asked the court to force DHS to publish all statutorily required computer matching agreements about the overhauled SAVE system in the Federal Register. Computer matching agreements are required under the Privacy Act when two or more agency or non-Federal records are used to compare information between systems for benefits eligibility verification. The overhauled SAVE system is a new matching program, yet the DHS has not executed matching agreements—let alone published notice of them in the Federal Register for public comment. 

EPIC has a long history of protecting voter privacy and been closely tracking the Trump administration’s efforts to consolidate and dismantle safeguards on personal data held in government databases. This case is one of EPIC’s efforts to derail the creation of an illegal national citizenship data bank and fight against government misuse of personal information, including citizenship data.

The case is brought by the League of Women Voters, the League of Women Voters of Texas, the League of Women Voters of Louisiana, the League of Women Voters of Louisiana and League of Women Voters Louisiana Education Fund, the League of Women Voters of Virginia, and EPIC. The case is League of Women Voters v. DHS, No. 25-03501 (D.D.C.)