The Department of Homeland Security has quietly lowered the accuracy rate of its SAVE system, the collection of databases the government is using to pressure states to clean up their voter rolls.
DHS has cut SAVE’s target accuracy rate from 99% to 97%, and the actual accuracy rate — how often employees got the right answer during manual checks — fell from 99% in 2024 to 98% last year, according to data U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provided to Congress this spring.
While a small shift, given the large number of queries run, that works out to thousands of U.S. citizens who are getting flagged as noncitizens and forced to reaffirm their citizenship.
SAVE — officially the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — is at the heart of a number of Trump administration plans, from trying to cut down on fraud in welfare to the attempt to force states to remove ineligible names from their registration lists.
It combines data from Social Security, the State Department and Homeland Security and from several dozen states that have shared their own information, allowing the government to cross-check names to try to spot duplicates and other ineligible voters.
As of March, the system had helped DHS flag more than 25,000 names as potential noncitizens on states’ voter rolls, in addition to spotting more than 330,000 names of dead people, according to data reviewed by The Washington Times.
More than 20,000 names were also referred to Homeland Security Investigations, DHS’s detective branch, for further action.
The administration’s attempt to expand the use of SAVE has sparked lawsuits from voting and immigration groups who say it’s an illegal takeover of elections, intruding on states’ rights to manage their voter rolls. And for USCIS to downgrade its accuracy is worrying.
“Shouldn’t you test the system first before you roll it out on a nationwide scale?” said Nickhel Sus, a lawyer for the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is representing challengers in a lawsuit against the expanding use of SAVE. “There was no extensive testing on this before they rolled it out. This was a build-the-plane-while-you’re flying approach.”
He said that given the Trump administration’s expansion of SAVE, there are an awful lot of names that were wrongly flagged when the accuracy rate dipped from 99% to 98%.
Some 60 million voter names were run against SAVE starting in April 2025. The accuracy rate comes into play when someone claiming to be a citizen is flagged against SAVE’s records. USCIS then performs a manual check.
The accuracy rate USCIS reported to Congress — both the actual and target numbers — applies to those manual checks. The errors come when someone is wrongly identified as a noncitizen.
USCIS said the most common of those cases include where someone was a citizen at birth but born abroad and never obtained an official record of citizenship, or where a child who came as a legal permanent resident later automatically acquired citizenship through a parent, but didn’t update the records. Those children could still be listed as green card holders in government databases.
In its official filing with Congress, USCIS said its system maintains a “high accuracy” rate, but acknowledged some hiccups over the previous year, saying cases have “gotten more complex.” That’s partly due to the Trump administration rolling back so many Biden grants of leniency.
USCIS also said it lost “many” experienced employees in last year’s government-wide buyouts.
In a statement to The Times, the agency didn’t explain the reason for cutting the target accuracy rate, but celebrated the program.
“Over the past year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has overhauled the SAVE program, making it fully operational and providing states with an easy-to-use tool that has resulted in over 60 million voter verification queries processed since April 2025,” said Zach Kahler, an agency spokesman. “USCIS is committed to helping eliminate voter fraud and restore trust in America’s elections by ensuring only U.S. citizens vote. USCIS continues to strengthen the SAVE program and encourages all states to utilize it.”
Mr. Sus, though, said the system wasn’t built for what the government is trying to do.
He said the name of the program includes the “entitlement,” making clear it is supposed to check eligibility for welfare-style programs that limit eligibility to legal immigrants. And the word “alien” in the program’s name shows it was meant to check foreign nationals, not U.S. citizens.
Mr. Sus said the way the system plays out also ends up putting the burden on voters to prove their own eligibility. If they miss a notice in the mail, they could be stripped from the rolls and find themselves unable to cast a regular ballot in the next election.
In Travis County, Texas, officials were told last year that 97 names on their lists had been flagged by SAVE. But 65 of them had previously had their citizenship verified by the state’s Department of Public Safety, the county said.
“That error rate is wholly unacceptable when the impact is possible exclusion from the voter rolls,” the county said in a filing with DHS urging it to stop using SAVE for voter verification.
Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project, said a 98% accuracy rate was pretty good.
“I’m pretty happy with that for a government program,” she said. “I don’t know any other government program that works as efficiently as E-Verify and SAVE.”
E-Verify is another USCIS system that firms can use to check their new hires’ work eligibility status. It went through a period of hiccups, including a high accuracy rate. Those issues have been largely worked out over the years, to the point where the government now reports that fewer than 2 in 1,000 applicants are wrongly flagged as ineligible.
Ms. Jenks said the country is overdue for a system to weed out noncitizen voters. She said the government should find a way to link IRS data with SAVE and more states should be prodded to share their information, too.
“We clearly have to have a data system that distinguishes between citizens and noncitizens if only for the purpose of voting,” she said.
Mr. Sus, though, said if that’s what the administration wants, it will need Congress’s approval first. And, he said, it will need a lot of fine-tuning.
“What they’re trying to do now is repurpose old systems to fill that function. I think that’s going to be an inherent limitation, in addition to illegal, because you can’t repurpose old data that way,” he said. “There’s a reason why there’s not a law on this. It’s not popular. People don’t want a national citizenship database.”
