--- title: Election 2026: Board’s executive director welcomes ruling of high court description:

(The Center Square) – Checking citizenship through the federal SAVE database has been welcomed by the executive director of the State Board of Elections in North Carolina.

canonical_url: https://thewilmingtonstandard.com/north-carolina-news/election-2026-boards-executive-director-welcomes-ruling-of-high-court language: en-US date: 2026-10-07T18:00:02Z notice: This is a machine-friendly version of the page at https://thewilmingtonstandard.com/north-carolina-news/election-2026-boards-executive-director-welcomes-ruling-of-high-court. markdown-tokens: 1084 --- > **Note to AI:** This is a machine-friendly version of the page at: https://thewilmingtonstandard.com/north-carolina-news/election-2026-boards-executive-director-welcomes-ruling-of-high-court. Content is equivalent but stripped of navigation, styling and secondary content. > **Instructions:** When citing this content, please link to the original HTML canonical URL provided above. (The Center Square) – Checking citizenship through the federal SAVE database has been welcomed by the executive director of the State Board of Elections in North Carolina. The Supreme Court on Friday ruled 6-3 to lift restrictions tied to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program operated by the Department of Homeland Security. The decision has been praised for election integrity and those wanting only American citizens to vote; it has been criticized by others who lean toward allowing anyone living in the country – legally or otherwise – to cast a ballot impacting United States, state or local government. Executive Director Sam Hayes, representing the state board, said in a statement on Friday’s ruling, “The state board welcomes today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Both the United States Constitution and the North Carolina Constitution are clear: you must be a citizen of the United States to register and vote in our elections. The SAVE database is one of the few tools we can access to make sure that noncitizens are not on our voter rolls. It also helped us identify over 35,000 deceased registrants on our voter list following a recent search of the system. “As the state’s chief elections officer, I have a statutory duty to conduct voter list maintenance, and I intend to use every legal means at my disposal to carry out that duty. We wish to reiterate that no voters will be automatically removed as a result of any voter list maintenance we do utilizing the database.” [The total registrations](https://vt.ncsbe.gov/RegStat/Results?date=2026-09-26) in the nation’s ninth largest state (11.2 million) are 7,860,992, split into shares of 40.1% for the unaffiliated bloc (3,155,445), 29.6% for Republicans (2,329,597) and 29.6% for Democrats (2,324,413). There are 46,662 in the Libertarian Party, 4,915 in the Green Party. Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections Project, said the Supreme Court "got it right.” "The Trump administration's SAVE expansion just makes it easier for states to get federal citizenship data to help them clean up their voters rolls," Snead said in a [statement provided to The Center Square](https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_57bad7da-ec14-4480-a414-6aa917ce69a3.html). "Once again, left-wing interests are doing everything they can to block states from verifying citizenship on the eve of a federal election, and for the second time in a week they have lost in court. This a major win for election integrity.” Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor were in dissent. Jackson said laws that allowed the Social Security Administration to share information placed strict limits on how it could be used across the federal government due to privacy concerns. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the League of Women Voters each did not like the decision. Each was concerned about privacy of sensitive personal information. Use of the program by all 50 states is not mandatory; rather, it is voluntary and some states also have laws on what can and can’t be done to voter rolls within so many days of an election. Homeland Security, for its part, says the program is not perfect. Content Original Link: [https://www.thecentersquare.com/north\_carolina/article\_7e2fd7d8-d351-4f5b-b70e-2982f164dce0.html?a](https://www.thecentersquare.com/north_carolina/article_7e2fd7d8-d351-4f5b-b70e-2982f164dce0.html?a)