By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
July 11, 2025
While still fighting with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over verifying the citizenship of nearly 600,000 Hoosier voters, Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales announced earlier this week that his office has entered into an agreement with the federal agency to get access to a database that is being touted as a tool to identify noncitizens on the voting rolls.
The memorandum of agreement was signed July 1 by Morales and the acting chief of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. It enables Indiana to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database’s information to check whether registered voters or individuals registering to vote are U.S. citizens. Federal laws and the Indiana Constitution prohibit noncitizens from casting a ballot.
In a statement, Morales said, “This agreement is another step in safeguarding the rights of every eligible Hoosier voter and reflects our commitment to protecting the integrity of our elections.”
The agreement comes as Indiana’s new proof-of-citizenship voter laws take effect and the state’s lawsuit is continuing in federal court against the Department of Homeland Security for not verifying the citizenship status of 585,774 voters. In October 2024, less than a month before the general election, Morales and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita had asked USCIS to identify any noncitizens on that list of voters, but when the agency did not respond, they filed a complaint in the Southern Indiana District Court.
Both Morales’ office and Rokita’s office declined to say whether the secretary of state consulted with the state’s top lawyer before entering into the agreement with DHS. The attorney general’s office said it does not discuss or disclose confidential legal advice that it provides to its client agencies.
However, Rokita’s office did note that the MOA does not render the ongoing litigation moot. Moreover, the office said the SAVE database could not adequately verify the 585,774 voters.
“The SAVE system which the Secretary of State’s MOA relies on does not provide an adequate means for processing the request we submitted to USCIS in October, which USCIS is obligated by law to satisfy,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement. “The Secretary of State’s MOA thus doesn’t come close to creating the arrangements the state needs to have in place for USCIS to process the October request.”
This year, the USCIS created what it touted “a single, reliable source for verifying immigration status and U.S. citizenship nationwide” by merging the data from the Social Security Administration into the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. According to the USCIS announcement, the upgrade verifies legal status by using voters’ Social Security numbers, instead of relying on the identification number from the Department of Homeland Security, which most states do not have.
While the agreement gives the Indiana secretary of state access to the expanded SAVE database, Morales’ office said the SAVE system is among several resources available to check a voter’s status. State and local election administrators have long had administrative access to vital information databases, including those maintained by the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. Postal Service’s change of address data, the Indiana Department of Health, the U.S. Social Security Administration, and the state and federal departments of correction, the office said.
“Voter registration and voter list maintenance administration are conducted pursuant to state law and the National Voter Registration Act,” Morales’ office said in an email.
Under the terms of the agreement, the secretary of state can submit information to verify the citizenship or immigration status of voters and registrants. The data Morales’ office must provide includes the voter’s full name, date of birth and a “government issued enumerator,” such as a Social Security number or a DHS-issued identifier, including an alien number or certification of naturalization number.
The Institute for Responsive Government has highlighted in a May 2025 analysis its concerns about the accuracy of the expanded SAVE database, especially since the system has never used Social Security numbers to verify citizenship. In particular, the institute pointed out the Social Security Administration only began adding the U.S. citizenship indicator in the late 1970s or early 1980s, so SAVE might not be able to confirm the legal status of individuals who became citizens before that time.
Also, the institute has questions about the subsequent processes that will be used to verify the citizenship of voters who are initially flagged as potential noncitizens. Pointing to a 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the institute noted as many as 19% of the responses from SAVE have been found to require additional verification.
Voters and individuals registering to vote will have the opportunity to appeal if they are not verified as U.S. citizens by SAVE. Although the MOA provides that voters and registrants must have the opportunity to use the secretary of state’s existing process to appeal the denial and to contact the federal government to get their immigration records corrected, it does not list any specifics as to what the appeals process must include.
How the voter information is handled is another concern of the institute. Even though the MOA restricts the secretary of state to using the info only to verify citizenship through the SAVE system, the federal agencies are not under any similar limits. Homeland security and USCIS can share the voter information broadly across the federal government and, through the verification process, may acquire data they do not have, such as an individual’s current address.
As part of the agreement, the secretary of state must provide voters and people registering to vote written notification that their citizenship or immigration status may be verified against federal records. The form that written notice will take is not specified by the MOA, so information could be sent as a separate letter to voters or included as a sentence or two within a disclaimer.
The National Conference of State Legislatures noted in a May 2025 report that despite the continued focus on illegal voters, the prevalence of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections is very low. No clear evidence exists, the NCSL report said, that significant numbers of noncitizens are registering to vote or casting ballots in elections. Even so, statehouses have been increasingly taking steps to keep noncitizens from voting with nine states, including Indiana, enacting proof-of-citizenship requirements.
“While there is no evidence that voting by noncitizens has ever swayed election outcomes, reducing the possibility that noncitizens vote is driving this policy trend,” the NCSL said in its report.
On July 1 of this year, Indiana’s new proof-of-citizenship voting laws took effect. House Enrolled Acts 1264 and 1680 require a birth certificate, passport or certificate of naturalization from voters and people registering to vote who are listed by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles as holding temporary driving credentials. The temporary license indicates they may not be U.S. citizens.
Voting-rights groups have warned the secretary of state that the citizenship requirement will “unduly burden” naturalized citizens and, therefore, likely violates the National Voter Registration Act. The groups are threatening legal action to block the proof-of-citizenship provisions in the two statutes.
In April, the secretary of state and the attorney general filed their lawsuit against the DHS, seeking to force the agency to verify the citizenship of the 585,774 voter names submitted in October. The state officials are asserting that by not responding to their request, DHS has violated federal law.
“Defendants have an unwavering statutory obligation under 8 U.S.C. sections 1373 and 1644 to provide citizenship information, but they have refused to do so,” the state’s lawsuit asserted. “That failure qualifies as an agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed.”
Rokita’s office said the MOA does not render the lawsuit moot. The MOA will enable the citizenship verification for “only a small fraction of registered voters,” the attorney general’s office said. The lawsuit “would allow for far more robust and comprehensive citizenship verification.”
“The relief Attorney General Rokita seeks in his ongoing lawsuit against USCIS would allow Indiana – and likely all other states – to obtain the citizenship verification from USCIS that we asked for in October,” the office told The Indiana Citizen.
Even so, the parties have indicated they might be close to resolving the dispute.
On June 20, the Southern Indiana District Court granted the parties’ joint motion for a 60-day extension on all deadlines. In their filing, the state and DHS told the court they are “engaged in active and ongoing settlement discussions and are hopeful that they will ultimately be able to resolve this matter without the need for further involvement from the Court.”
Homeland Security is now scheduled to file its answer to the state’s complaint no later than Aug. 25, 2025.
Other states have announced they have also gained access to the SAVE database. Like Indiana, those states are championing the SAVE system as helping to protect the integrity of elections by ensuring only U.S. citizens cast a ballot.
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry claimed back in May that the Pelican State was the first to use the new SAVE system. In July, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray touted “election integrity” when announcing that he had signed a memorandum of agreement with the DHS-USCIS.
Texas officials are using the SAVE data to pursue prosecutions of noncitizen voters. In June, Secretary of State Jane Nelson called the SAVE system a “game-changer,” and said the database had identified 33 individuals as potential noncitizens who had voted in the November 2024 general election. Less than two weeks later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his office had opened investigations into those individuals.
Even while state secretaries are advocating the SAVE system, the Institute for Responsive Government is recommending election officials proceed with caution to ensure unverified data is not used to remove citizens from voter rolls. The institute suggests that states submit individuals whose U.S. citizenship status is known to test the system’s accuracy and that states work closely with USCIS to make sure the process does not mistakenly flag a U.S. citizen and the database is updated regularly.
Asked whether the secretary of state would be doing any test runs before inserting large batches of the voter rolls into the SAVE database, Morales’ office indicated the verifications would be run individually.
“Based on provisions from House Enrolled Act 1264, confirmation of naturalization numbers may occur on a case-by-case basis at the request of the local voter registration offices,” Morales’ office said.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
