Trump stacks wins: SCOTUS unleashes voter citizenship checks and CISA puts machines on a leash

President Donald Trump enjoyed two end-of-week wins for election integrity, measures his administration has prioritized since the beginning of the 47th president's second term. The two-fer involved a win at the Supreme Court for the SAVE database, which verifies U.S. citizenship for voter rolls, and guidance released by the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommending paper ballots, post-election manual audits and other hardening measures to fortify elections.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., spoke to Just The News about the Supreme Court ruling, and emphasized that even deep-blue New York, the state ruled the same way. "Our New York State Court of Appeals—they're all left-leaning, all appointed by either Cuomo or Governor -- ruled unanimously that only citizens can vote in our elections. So why would we let people who are ineligible to vote get on our voter rolls?"

SCOTUS ruling

The Supreme Court on Friday paused a lower-court injunction and cleared the way for states to resume using a modified federal database to check whether registered voters are U.S. citizens.

The fight began in March 2025, when Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to expand the decades-old Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE. The overhaul added Social Security records, including data on U.S.-born citizens, and allowed officials to run searches in bulk rather than one name at a time.

Voting-rights groups sued. In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of Washington, D.C., a Biden nominee, blocked the expanded system. She said the government had “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens” and that states were removing eligible voters based on flawed matches. An appeals court left her order in place.

The Justice Department called that ruling indefensible and asked the justices for emergency relief. In an unsigned opinion, the court said federal law already requires the government to answer state requests to verify citizenship and that Sooknanan’s order “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

The stay is not a final ruling on the merits. Federal law also bars systematic voter-roll purges within 90 days of an election, so Friday’s order is expected to matter most for individual checks before November 3 and for broader roll maintenance after the midterms, but the win solidifies that states can again use federal records to ask a basic question — whether the person on the list is a citizen.

CISA's plan: Paper ballots, manual audits, multi-factor authentication, tighter access controls, log retention

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday released its 2026 Election Infrastructure Security Plan, the first public election-security blueprint from the agency since the Trump administration froze much of that work last year.

The 13-page document, titled “Securing the Next 250,” landed about 40 days before the Nov. 3 midterms. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin tasked CISA with writing it in July after a long pause in federal election-security assistance. The agency had already cut roughly 1,000 employees and lost dedicated election-adviser capacity. Officials in both parties said those cuts weakened day-to-day help for state and local clerks.

The new plan does not rewrite who can vote. It tells election offices to treat infrastructure as a year-round target. CISA warns that hackers have tried to breach voter-registration systems in all 50 states, with confirmed success in at least 20. It flags weak patching, insider risk, physical threats to polling places, and databases that are too easy to reach from public lookup tools.

The recommendations are old-school by design: paper ballots, post-election manual audits, multi-factor authentication, tighter access controls, and log retention for at least a year. 

CISA also says it will offer a no-cost information-sharing platform for fusion centers and election officials and assign regional directors as security advisers.

After a year of drift, the federal government is again telling states the same thing election-integrity advocates have said for years: count votes on paper, audit the count, and lock down the rolls.

Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just the News. You can follow her here.