The US Supreme Court has lifted restrictions preventing the Trump administration from using a federal database to check voters’ citizenship, overturning a lower-court ruling. The decision is a victory for the administration’s efforts to address alleged non-citizen voting, but critics warn that legitimate voters could be wrongly removed from electoral registers.

The Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system was created in 1986 to verify citizenship or immigration status for public-benefit applications. The administration expanded it to allow bulk searches using Social Security numbers; a Biden-appointed judge ruled in June that this violated citizens’ privacy and threatened voting rights, but the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices overturned that decision, while three liberal justices dissented.