Supreme Court’s recent ruling on voting means Kansans should check their registration status now

Poll workers help a voter on Aug. 6, 2024, at a Lawrence precinct. (Photo by Maya Smith for Kansas Reflector)

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that election officials can remove registered voters from their voter rolls using an inaccurate system called the SAVE database.

If you are removed from a voter roll, that means you are no longer registered to vote. So, when you show up to vote on or before election day, you can’t vote your regular ballot. Instead, you’ll have to cast a provisional ballot, which may or may not ultimately count. Election officials do not have to inform you if you are removed — you can be taken off the list and not know until election day, when it’s too late.

The SAVE database was created by Congress for states to check the citizenship status of people requesting government benefits. The database was used for decades for its intended purpose until last year, when Trump issued Executive Order 14248. Trump directed DHS to overhaul the SAVE database to add additional personal information about us, including our confidential Social Security records. Then, Trump directed states to have their election officials run their voter rolls through the SAVE database to find voters to remove from the eligible-voter list.

A glaring problem is the SAVE database is riddled with errors. It has flagged thousands of people as potential noncitizens to be removed from the voter rolls — people who ultimately turn out to be citizens. For example, using the SAVE database, 16,00 voters in Nevada were originally flagged by DHS as noncitizens. Then, the number dwindled to 185 noncitizens, then to zero — all of the 16,000 voters flagged by SAVE were citizens eligible to vote. The database is flawed.

Trump’s executive order was challenged, and a federal judge blocked his administration from using the SAVE database to remove voters from voter-registration rolls. The judge also found that the information obtained by the Trump administration and added to the expanded database violated multiple federal laws, including privacy laws.

However, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump could move forward allowing election officials to use the expanded SAVE database to remove registered voters from their voter rolls. That means the federal government can proceed to add our personal, confidential information to the database and make it available to those officials running elections.

Presumably, election officials in red states will embrace using the SAVE database. Kansas is a red state.

Election officials in blue states who resist will face enormous pressure: The federal government has conditioned federal funding on whether an election office uses the SAVE database. Trump’s executive order also directs his Department of Justice to criminally pursue election officials who allow people to vote flagged by the SAVE database, and earlier this year DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullen specifically threatened criminal charges against election officials who don’t use the database.

We are less than 40 days from the midterm election. Federal law prohibits removing voters from voter rolls less than 90 days before an election. Theoretically, then, the midterm election should be safe from mass removal of registered voters. However, that’s not to stop some election officials from trying to remove registered voters before the midterms, and the National Republican Party has taken the legal position that mass removal of voters close to an election is permissible.

We don’t know what’s going to happen to the voter roll in Kansas in the coming weeks — who will remain on the list and who has been or will be removed without notice.

So now is the time — before Oct. 13 — to check that you are still on the list of registered voters. Go to the Kansas Secretary of State’s website to confirm that you are registered to vote. Tell your family and friends to check their voter registration, too.

Amii Castle is a professor at the University of Kansas, where she teaches at the law and business schools. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.