The Supreme Court just threw a new monkey wrench at the midterms. Here’s what to know

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Election Day is fast approaching, but the Supreme Court is still weighing in on the rules — most recently on Friday when it allowed states to use a Trump administration - backed tool to ferret out noncitizen voting there’s little evidence occurs in a widespread way.

Nobody wants noncitizens voting illegally, but the move by justices less than two months from Election Day raises the real concern that legal citizen voters could find themselves unable to cast ballots.

Supreme Court justices have already been faced with multiple questions about the coming election.

They gutted the Voting Rights Act , supercharging a race to redraw congressional maps this year and into the future.

There’s still one state, Missouri , wondering which congressional districts its voters will cast ballots in come November because lower courts weighed in after the high court. Never mind that ballots have already been printed and mailed.

David A. Lieb/AP/File

While the justices blessed the redrawing of maps for partisan gain, they hit pause, at least for now, on the Trump administration’s plan to upend mail-in voting writ large, tabling that issue for the next election.

Noncitizen voting has been a bugbear for Trump for years. He has alleged there is widespread fraud even in elections he won, although neither of his administrations has been able to find much evidence.

I asked CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, a national political writer, about the database this decision unleashes and what it could mean for people trying to cast ballots.

SCHOUTEN: It’s a federal tool known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. It’s been around for decades and has long been used to verify the citizenship and immigration status of people seeking government benefits. And some election officials have had agreements in the past to use the tool, for a fee, to check the citizenship status of voters.

But the Trump administration dramatically revamped it, starting last year. It’s now linked to lots of government data as part of the administration’s push to hunt for potential noncitizens on the voting rolls.

SCHOUTEN: The SAVE America Act is different but sort of related in that they are both focused on the question of whether only US citizens are casting ballots.

The SAVE America Act would have dramatically revamped voting rules across the country, requiring voter ID to cast a ballot and mandating that people provide documents, such as a birth certificate of US passport, proving their citizenship when they register to vote. It would also put pressure on states to use the SAVE data system and other data tools like it for purging rolls.

Critics say many legitimate voters don’t have easy access to those documents and argue the proposal would have disenfranchised many Americans.

I should say here that experts note that voting by noncitizens in federal elections, which is already illegal, is exceedingly rare. But this has become an animating issue for the president.

SCHOUTEN: The Trump administration linked the information already in SAVE to other federal data, most notably Social Security Administration records, which cover most Americans.

The administration then encouraged election officials to carry out bulk uploads of their states’ registration rolls and waived any fee to do so. Tens of millions of records were run through the system before a federal judge blocked its use earlier this year.

With Friday’s ruling, the US Supreme Court has allowed SAVE to be used again for reviewing voter rolls.

SCHOUTEN: That’s not entirely clear.

The high court’s opinion emphasized that SAVE can be used for “individualized” checks of a voter’s citizenship in the upcoming election but also noted that federal law prohibits mass purges close to Election Day.

But the administration has argued that the federal ban on mass removals within 90 days of an election doesn’t apply to purges involving noncitizens who were improperly registered in the first place. The Supreme Court will decide that question in a case this coming term — but not before the midterms.

Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg/Getty Images

SCHOUTEN: Let’s back up a bit.

In addition to encouraging states to use SAVE to conduct their own reviews of their voting rolls, the Justice Department has been on a campaign to obtain each state’s full, unredacted lists of voters, including personal information about voters, such as full dates or birth and partial Social Security numbers, to do its own check on whether states are complying with federal law.

When those states refused, the DOJ sued. So far, the agency has lost all 25 cases in which a judge has ruled.

But federal agencies have moved forward with efforts to try to find potential noncitizens on voting rolls — including using publicly available voter lists. A recent whistleblower complaint released by several Democrats on Capitol Hill alleged that agents in the Department of Homeland Security, who were tasked with rooting out voter fraud, are being kept in the dark about the sources of some of the data being used in their reviews.

And the dispute the Supreme Court was ruling on Friday was the administration’s ability to offer the SAVE systems to states that want to voluntarily want to use it for their own voter list maintenance.

SCHOUTEN: One overarching worry from critics of the SAVE tool is that it’s not reliable.

Take Texas, for example. State officials there ran all 18 million names of its voters through the SAVE tool last year and announced that their audit had found 2,724 potential noncitizens and directed counties to give voters 30 days to verify their citizenship or be removed from the rolls.

Those numbers began dropping once local election officials began digging — in part, because the system doesn’t appear to properly track naturalized citizens.

Earlier this year, I interviewed a Texas resident who became ensnared by the audit. She was born in Argentina and was a naturalized US citizen, yet state officials tagged her as a suspected noncitizen. She was able to quickly send in a scan of her US passport and remain a voter.

Earlier this month, Texas officials announced that hundreds of potential noncitizens flagged last year were indeed Americans and eligible to vote and called on local officials to reinstate their registrations if they had been removed.

SCHOUTEN: If you are worried about this or any other voting issue, you can always verify your registration status with your local election office. There’s enough time before the general election to fix any problems.

CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.

内森·霍华德/路透社

选举日即将到来，但最高法院仍在权衡相关规则——最近一次是在上周五，当时最高法院允许各州使用特朗普政府支持的一项工具来查明非公民投票，而几乎没有证据表明这种投票行为普遍存在。

没有人希望非公民非法投票，但大法官们在距离选举日不到两个月之际采取的这一举措，确实引发了人们的担忧，即合法公民选民可能会发现自己无法投票。

最高法院大法官们已经面临着许多与即将到来的选举有关的问题。

他们削弱了《投票权法案》，加速了今年及未来重新划分国会选区的进程。

还有一个州，密苏里州，仍然不知道该州选民在11月的大选中应该在哪些国会选区投票，因为最高法院裁决后，下级法院也介入了此事。尽管选票已经印制完毕并寄出，但这个问题仍然悬而未决。

David A. Lieb/美联社/档案照片

虽然大法官们认可了为了党派利益而重新划分选区的做法，但他们暂停了特朗普政府彻底推翻邮寄投票的计划，至少目前如此，并将该问题留到下次选举中再处理。

非公民投票一直是特朗普多年来的一大心病。他声称即使在他赢得的选举中也存在普遍的舞弊行为，尽管他的两届政府都未能找到多少证据。

我询问了 CNN 的全国政治撰稿人 Fredreka Schouten，这项决定将释放出一个数据库，以及这对试图投票的人们可能意味着什么。

舒滕：这是一套名为“福利领取系统性外国人身份核查”（Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements）的联邦工具。它已经存在几十年了，长期以来一直被用于核实申请政府福利者的公民身份和移民身份。过去，一些选举官员曾与政府达成协议，付费使用该工具来核查选民的公民身份。

但特朗普政府从去年开始对其进行了大幅修改。现在，它与大量政府数据相连，这是该政府为查找选民名册上潜在的非公民而采取的举措之一。

舒滕：拯救美国法案有所不同，但又在某种程度上相关，因为它们都关注只有美国公民才能投票的问题。

《拯救美国法案》本将大幅改革全国的投票规则，要求选民出示身份证明才能投票，并强制要求人们在登记投票时提供出生证明或美国护照等文件以证明其公民身份。该法案还将敦促各州使用“拯救美国”数据系统及其他类似数据工具来清理选民名册。

批评人士表示，许多合法选民无法轻易获得这些文件，并认为该提案会剥夺许多美国人的选举权。

我在此要指出，专家们认为，非公民在联邦选举中投票（这本身就是非法的）极其罕见。但这却成了总统极为关注的问题。

舒滕：特朗普政府将 SAVE 中已有的信息与其他联邦数据联系起来，最值得注意的是社会保障署的记录，该记录涵盖了大多数美国人。

随后，政府鼓励各州选举官员批量上传选民登记册，并免除所有相关费用。在今年早些时候一位联邦法官叫停该系统之前，已有数千万条记录通过该系统进行处理。

随着周五的裁决，美国最高法院允许再次使用 SAVE 系统来审查选民名册。

舒滕：这一点还不完全清楚。

最高法院的意见强调，SAVE 可以用于在即将到来的选举中对选民的公民身份进行“个性化”核查，但也指出联邦法律禁止在选举日临近时进行大规模的选民信息清理。

但政府辩称，联邦法律禁止在选举前90天内进行大规模选民清除，但这并不适用于那些最初登记不当的非公民。最高法院将在下个任期内就此案作出裁决——但不会在中期选举前做出裁决。

Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg/Getty Images

舒滕：我们先回顾一下。

除了鼓励各州使用 SAVE 系统对其选民名册进行审查外，司法部还开展了一项运动，以获取各州完整的、未经编辑的选民名单，包括选民的个人信息，例如完整的出生日期和部分社会保障号码，以便自行检查各州是否遵守联邦法律。

当这些州拒绝配合时，司法部提起了诉讼。迄今为止，司法部在法官判决的25起案件中全部败诉。

但联邦机构已继续推进在选民名册中查找潜在非公民的工作，包括使用公开的选民名单。最近，几位国会山民主党议员公布了一份举报人投诉，称国土安全部负责打击选民欺诈的特工，对其审查中使用的一些数据的来源毫不知情。

最高法院周五裁决的争议是，政府是否有权向自愿使用 SAVE 系统维护选民名单的州提供该系统。

舒滕：SAVE 工具的批评者普遍担心它不可靠。

以德克萨斯州为例。该州官员去年使用 SAVE 工具核查了全部 1800 万选民的姓名，并宣布审计结果发现有 2724 名潜在的非公民，并指示各县给予选民 30 天时间来核实其公民身份，否则将被从选民名册中移除。

当地选举官员开始深入调查后，这些数字开始下降——部分原因是该系统似乎没有正确跟踪入籍公民。

今年早些时候，我采访了一位被卷入审计的德州居民。她出生于阿根廷，已入籍美国，但州政府官员却将她列为疑似非公民。她迅速提交了美国护照扫描件，得以继续保留投票权。

本月初，德克萨斯州官员宣布，去年被标记的数百名潜在非公民实际上是美国公民，有资格投票，并呼吁地方官员恢复已被移除的选民登记。

舒滕：如果您对这项或其他任何投票问题感到担忧，您可以随时向当地选举办公室核实您的登记状态。距离大选还有充足的时间来解决任何问题。

CNN的蒂尔尼·斯尼德对本报道亦有贡献。