ATLANTA — Georgia will not be purging voter rolls en masse using a controversial federal database to check voter citizenship ahead of this year’s midterm elections, but the database is still at work in the state.
“We’re back in business,” says Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, as a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allows states to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, to search for non-Americans on voter lists.
While SAVE remains in the toolbox of Secretary Raffensperger, he says we are in a federal blackout period for list maintenance.
SAVE was created decades ago to verify eligibility for government benefits. In recent years, it has also been used to check voter rolls for noncitizens.
The Secretary of State’s Office explains that federal law prohibits it from systematic list maintenance—purges—90 days before a federal election, but that the SAVE database is still being used “each and every day.”
In the 90-day pre-federal election period, only individually-focused voter list maintenance—such as updating the registration status of someone who has died, or someone who reaches out to let the office know they have changed their name—is permitted.
His office can resume large-scale voter list actions using the system along with other methods at the beginning of next year.
Raffensperger wrote the Department of Homeland Security in 2025 urging DHS to let additional standard personal identifying information be included the searches, such as birth dates and Social Security numbers.
The Social Security Administration says its system was not designed to check voter information in real time. SAVE has incorrectly flagged thousands of American voters, including naturalized citizens and people who have changed or hyphenated their names.
Raffensperger says Georgia does not rely on SAVE alone when verifying voter information.
“They have the naturalization and all of the citizenship records when people become American citizens, so we can access that directly and then check our data with them; we have a back and forth of exchanging information to make sure,” Raffensperger said.
He says the state also has a process in place to review cases when information from the system conflicts with Georgia’s records.
“We have a back and forth process, if this came back and they said this person is not a citizen yet we show them that they are, then we’re going to be looking to see what information they have, and then we will reach out to the voter,” Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger says Georgia has used the system before and has encountered only a small number of incorrect results.
“We’ve had maybe a few false negatives and then we would then check that and reach out to these potential voters to document that they have become American citizens. It just really allowed us to have accuracy,” he said.
The Secretary of State’s Office says Georgia’s voter lists remain 99.9% accurate.
A Justice Department investigation found three noncitizens in Georgia who have voted in at least one federal election dating back to 2008.
WSB Radio’s Ashley Simmons & Veronica Waters contributed to this story.