On September 25, the Supreme Court let the Trump administration go back to using SAVE, a Homeland Security database it rebuilt to check whether voters are citizens. Within days, Joe Lombardo, Nevada's Republican governor, was pushing to use it on Nevada voters before the November election.
According to News 3 Las Vegas, Lombardo sent a letter to Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar urging him to use "all legal means" to check voters' citizenship — including individual checks through SAVE, the kind federal law allows during the period leading up to an election.
The database flags real citizens
SAVE was built in 1986 to check whether immigrants applying for government benefits were eligible. It was never designed to check American voters. After the Trump administration rebuilt it, it started being used exactly that way — and getting it wrong.
We laid out the record when the Supreme Court ruled. In St. Louis County, Missouri, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. After checking, the list shrank to 133 — meaning at least 81% of the people SAVE called noncitizens were wrong. In Denton County, Texas, the people SAVE flagged were removed from the rolls if they didn't respond, even though the county's elections chief believed most of them were eligible voters.
The errors fall hardest on naturalized citizens, people who changed their last name when they married, and anyone whose name doesn't match exactly across government records.
Nevada's election chief says no
Aguilar answered in a statement to News 3:
"The SAVE system's unreliability is well-documented – it's known to flag eligible voters as ineligible. This is dangerous, because it unfairly disenfranchises U.S. citizens. Recently, election officials in Texas and Missouri have seen first-hand how much chaos the SAVE system can cause."
He also pointed out what the governor's letter skips: Nevada already has safeguards, it's a felony to knowingly register or vote when you're not eligible, and "any claims of a widespread problem are false and only create distrust in our elections."
"Elections should be administered by the states"
Lombardo's letter states a principle: "I have always maintained that elections should be administered by the states."
In the same letter, he asked Nevada to run its voters through a federal Homeland Security database that the Trump administration rebuilt and that a federal judge had blocked for trampling Americans' privacy — a block the Supreme Court paused, not overturned.
Lombardo's letter leans on a poll showing 85% of Americans think it's important that ineligible people not vote. Nobody disagrees with that. What the poll doesn't measure is how many Americans think eligible citizens should be knocked off the rolls weeks before an election by a database that gets it wrong.
Why the timing matters
Lombardo isn't asking for a review after the election, when mistakes could be fixed calmly. He's asking for checks during the period leading up to an election. That is when a wrongly flagged citizen has the least time to prove who they are — and those are exactly the people Aguilar is warning about: eligible Nevadans who did nothing wrong and get caught in a bad match.
What the record shows
Joe Lombardo is urging Nevada's election chief to run voters through Trump's rebuilt SAVE database in the weeks before the November election — a tool that, in one Missouri county, was wrong about at least 81% of the voters it flagged as noncitizens. Nevada's secretary of state says the system flags eligible voters, that there is no widespread problem to fix, and that he won't risk disenfranchising citizens.
