Trump administration promotes program to check voter eligibility; critics fear a midterm purge
Even as Democratic officials fight the effort in court, the Trump administration has run millions of voter registrations through government databases to determine their eligibility
Even as Democratic officials fight the effort in court, the Trump administration has run millions of voter registrations through government databases to determine their eligibility in a process that critics worry could end up purging valid voters from the rolls before the November elections. At least 67 million registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled states, have gone through a beefed-up verification program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and tens of thousands of those have been flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died. Some states allow only a month for people to prove their eligibility and others suspend it immediately. DHS verification system The scanning of state voter rolls at the national level is part of a broader effort by Republican President Donald Trump to federalise certain election functions and promote his messaging that elections are marred by noncitizen voting, even though instances of that are rare. Voting and civil rights advocates say the DHS system is error-prone and can mistakenly flag people who are eligible to vote. “If a voter is wrongly removed, by the time they learn about it and correct it, they may miss their opportunity to vote in that election,” said Freda Levenson, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The group is challenging an Ohio law requiring monthly checks with the DHS system. Voters such as 29-year-old Anthony Nel have been caught in the middle. U.S. appeals court upholds injunction that blocks Trump's order to create federal voter list The native of South Africa, who became a citizen more than a decade ago, was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter file through the DHS verification system. Nel's local election office in Denton, north of Dallas, temporarily canceled his registration last fall while he was waiting for a new passport to replace an expired one.
“I’m like, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that the passport exists,’” he said in an interview. Trump has been trying to overhaul U.S. elections, including calling for a federal list of verified voters, and his Department of Justice has pushed states to hand over unredacted voter information for mass checks through the DHS program known as SAVE. Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements The Justice Department has sued states that refuse, saying the government is trying to ensure that they are complying with federal law and have accurate voter lists. States already take a number of steps to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls. SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of DHS, said more than 1,300 agencies use it. At least 25 states have used SAVE to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities, and 60 million registrations were checked in a year's time, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services. That figure does not include an additional 7.4 million registrations from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board, that were recently run through the system. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in an emailed statement that it is “committed to helping eliminate voter fraud” to restore Americans' trust in their elections. “SAVE is one of the most important tools states have to verify voter information,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, recently told a U.S. House committee examining how states keep voter rolls clean. Schwab's endorsement is notable because he once was publicly skeptical that noncitizens represented a significant voter fraud threat. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the 60 million voter registration checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens.
The BriefWire