Nevada rejects federal voter citizenship check citing error rates

Nevada will not join a federal program designed to verify the citizenship status of registered voters, a decision state officials announced Tuesday to avoid potential errors in the voter rolls. State Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar confirmed the state’s refusal to participate in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program.

Aguilar received a letter on Monday from the Trump administration requesting Nevada’s participation in the voluntary initiative. The federal government framed the tool as an efficient method for state and local agencies to confirm citizenship or immigration status. Aguilar responded via text message on Tuesday, stating that the state has no interest in using the system because it produces too many false positives.

The decision comes one month after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings that had blocked the database on privacy grounds. In June, a federal judge had ruled that the government deliberately trampled on American privacy rights when it used the system to screen voters. An appeals court upheld that decision, but the Supreme Court reversed it last month, clearing the way for more states to use the tool.

Problems with the program have surfaced in other states. Reports from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune indicate that Missouri incorrectly identified hundreds of U.S. citizens as non-citizens. In Texas, at least 87 errors were found across 29 counties. The Trump administration’s letter acknowledged that states must take additional steps to confirm the data before canceling a registration, but some states like Missouri proceeded based on the tool’s findings without further verification.

The federal government has restructured the SAVE system to allow state election officials to upload voter records in bulk and query the database using the last four digits of a person’s Social Security number. This change makes the database free for states to use. The administration argues that more than 15,000 non-citizens could be on Nevada’s voter rolls.

Federal officials claimed to have identified about 185 possible non-citizens on the Nevada list nearly a month ago. State officials reviewed those specific records and concluded that all of them were likely citizens. In Nevada, voters must affirm their citizenship when registering. Voting while not a U.S. citizen is illegal under state and federal law.

More than half of the states are participating in the program, with many led by Republicans. At least seven of those participating agencies have publicly reported verifying their voter lists through the system. Those checks resulted in approximately 0.01 percent of voters being flagged as potential non-citizens.

The SAVE system was originally created to help federal agencies prevent benefits from going to non-citizens. The administration’s new approach focuses specifically on election administration. This week, federal prosecutors in Nevada charged a woman from southern Nevada with illegally voting in the 2024 elections.