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North Carolina’s top elections official said Friday that he will use “every legal means” at his disposal to find ineligible voters, including noncitizens, on the voter rolls following a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed the use of a controversial federal database.
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“The State Board (of Elections) welcomes today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Sam Hayes, the board’s executive director, said in a statement. “Both the United States Constitution and the North Carolina Constitution are clear: you must be a citizen of the United States to register and vote in our elections.”
Numerous studies at the state and federal level have found noncitizen voting to be exceedingly rare, but President Donald Trump has long argued without evidence that the phenomenon is widespread.
Friday’s ruling did not require states to use the database in question, which is called SAVE, but lifted a lower court’s order that had prohibited its usage nationwide. North Carolina’s Republican-majority elections board already voted to use SAVE in April.
In July, Hayes reported that DHS identified 1,599 potential noncitizens on the state’s rolls, though there was no immediate indication that any of them had actually voted.
SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, was originally designed to check citizenship for government benefits, but the Trump administration has revamped the system to check voter registrations.
Critics have raised concerns about the reliability of the system, which has been shown to flag eligible voters. In one Texas county, officials found that at least 10% of the voters flagged as noncitizens were, in fact, legal U.S. citizens, AP reported.
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Friday’s ruling also comes during a federally mandated “quiet period” in which states are blocked from systematically purging voter rolls in the 90 days before an election.
Hayes did not say whether the agency planned to use SAVE in the lead-up to the Nov. 3 election.
“As the state’s chief elections officer, I have a statutory duty to conduct voter list maintenance, and I intend to use every legal means at my disposal to carry out that duty,” he said. “We wish to reiterate that no voters will be automatically removed as a result of any voter list maintenance we do utilizing the database.”
North Carolina voters can check their registration status online at vt.ncsbe.gov/RegLkup.
Oct. 9 is the voter registration deadline for the 2026 midterms, but prospective voters can also register during in-person early voting, which ends on Oct. 31.
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