The Trump administration is intensifying its marketing campaign in opposition to alleged voter fraud, taking new steps towards constructing a nationwide citizen database and ramping up its hunt for suspected noncitizen voters — all beneath the banner of “election integrity.”
The newest escalation — together with an executive order, a newly empowered prosecutor and a rising raft of lawsuits — has drawn recent warnings from critics who say the administration’s push to amass huge troves of voter knowledge from throughout the nation may very well be used to block eligible Americans from voting and stoke recent doubts concerning the legitimacy of the 2026 midterm elections.
The Justice Department has finalized a cope with the Department of Homeland Security to give DHS delicate voter-roll knowledge the administration has demanded from states to be checked in opposition to a citizenship verification program that has been criticized for its inaccuracies.
Trump officers final week floated a new potential stress tactic on states that to date have refused to hand over their full voter rolls: Conditioning lots of of tens of millions of {dollars} in homeland safety grants on sharing voter knowledge, requiring states to run their registration rolls via the federal immigration data system or lose the funding.
Heather Honey — an election skeptic introduced into DHS to work on “election integrity” — raised the concept on a Thursday name with Federal Emergency Management Agency leaders who run the grant packages, in accordance to three sources conversant in the decision. As of Friday, it hadn’t been applied. Last 12 months, at DHS’ path, FEMA added necessities that states to spend at the very least 3% of these grants on “enhancing election security.”
A DHS spokesperson stated that they had “no changes to the Homeland Security Grant Program to announce at this time.”
For months, the Justice Department has tried to guarantee courts that the administration was not looking for to assemble a nationwide voter registration record with its calls for that states present delicate details about the voters on their rolls. But on Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an govt order centered on citizenship knowledge and mail ballots that seems to just do that, within the face of the Constitution’s command that states — not the federal authorities — are the first directors of elections.
Also on Tuesday, two days earlier than Trump ousted her, Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced that she had deputized a US lawyer who beforehand questioned Trump’s 2020 defeat to work on elections points. In his new function, Dan Bishop, the highest federal prosecutor for Middle District of North Carolina, will study voter registration knowledge obtained by the administration and seek for noncitizen voters, a individual conversant in the matter advised NCS.
The administration has now sued 30 states and the District of Columbia as a result of they’d not produce their unredacted voter lists voluntarily. After months of proceedings in these instances, a DOJ lawyer in a March 26 listening to acknowledged for the primary time in courtroom that their objectives in acquiring the confidential knowledge included letting the Department of Homeland Security scan these rolls for ineligible names. The DHS citizenship verification program the administration is utilizing for the overview is recognized to give an inflated variety of potential noncitizens on the rolls.
“The issue with data is that you can find ways to make it tell a certain story,” stated Elisabeth Frost, the litigation chair of Elias Law Group, which has intervened on behalf of voters to oppose the Justice Department in its lawsuits looking for the voter rolls. “If the methods you’re using for sorting or searching the data are not completely transparent, you can tell a completely false story. And I think there are a lot of stories that are waiting in the wings to be told, depending on how these elections sort out.”
Since returning to workplace, Trump has continued to declare US elections are affected by fraud — together with giant numbers of noncitizens voting — tasking a number of companies with looking down proof that foreigners are tainting the outcomes. Noncitizens face the danger of prosecution and deportation in the event that they vote, and voters in federal elections are required to signal legally binding declarations affirming their citizenship.
Earlier this 12 months, Trump referred to as for the federal authorities to “take over” and “nationalize” voting in sure locations. The newest unilateral push comes as Republicans have signaled their unwillingness to change Senate filibuster guidelines to go the “SAVE America Act,” which might enact sweeping modifications to elections. Republicans are additionally weighing an uphill effort to go a model of that voting laws on a party-line vote via a difficult price range course of generally known as reconciliation.
Democrats, advocates and state officers swiftly sued to block the most recent Trump directive in courtroom on and election specialists anticipate courts to block it, simply as they halted giant elements of his 2025 election govt order looking for new citizenship verification necessities for voter registration and stricter mail-in voting guidelines.
The White House defended the DOJ’s efforts to acquire state voter lists, telling NCS the outcomes will assist guarantee states adjust to federal election legislation and stop American residents from casting ballots.
“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson stated. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”
The new Trump govt order is the clearest assertion but of the president’s want to have his administration — and never states — resolve who receives a poll.
His directive would create “citizenship lists” for each state by drawing on citizenship and naturalization data, Social Security knowledge and different federal databases to decide who is eligible to vote in federal elections.
But the federal authorities doesn’t have the instruments to amass its personal full record of eligible voters given the bounds of its inner knowledge, election specialists say, nor does it have that authorized authority. Smaller-scale makes an attempt to use immigration knowledge to confirm voter eligibility, absent extra investigation by state and native authorities, have wrongly flagged residents as noncitizens, partially as a result of the outdated knowledge doesn’t all the time seize when individuals are later naturalized.
Last 12 months, the Trump administration quietly revamped a federal program generally known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) that traditionally was used for public profit verifications however is now a instrument provided to states to seek for potential noncitizens on their rolls and one the DOJ now says it is going to be utilizing itself to overview registration lists. The overhaul expanded the databases feeding into this system, linking immigration data with Social Security databases and passport data.
More than two dozen states voluntarily use the SAVE system to assist with their record upkeep, and even that state-controlled train has confronted pushback.
Texas was sued March 26 by Latino voter advocates who allege the state’s use of the “half-baked” and “unreliable” federal instrument has led to unlawful purges of residents from the rolls.
Still, the Trump administration desires to use the system to do its personal critiques of state voter rolls, DOJ Voting Section performing chief Eric Neff advised a Rhode Island courtroom on March 26.
A proposed settlement the DOJ provided final 12 months to state election chiefs who had been leery of manufacturing the delicate voter data stated the states would have simply 45 days to take away voters the federal government had deemed to be ineligible. Only two states had been keen to signal the proposal, however one other 15 have supplied the info with agreeing to these phrases, the Justice Department has stated in courtroom.
“They want to centralize and essentially in effect do our jobs for us, which is incredibly problematic and unconstitutional and outside the scope of the authorization that Congress has given them,” one Republican state elections chief, who requested for anonymity to keep away from the administration’s ire, advised NCS earlier this 12 months.
At the courtroom listening to in Rhode Island, Neff assured a skeptical choose that the DHS SAVE system is “in effect 100% accurate.”
But state and native officers who’ve used the system have stated that it’s ensnared a important variety of residents.
Texas officers final fall identified more than 2,700 potential noncitizens after operating their full record of greater than 18 million voters within the SAVE database. But in Travis County, which incorporates Austin, 11 of the 97 voters initially flagged had already supplied proof of citizenship once they registered with the state driver’s license division, whereas the county’s investigative course of is nonetheless ongoing for the others, stated Celia Israel, who maintains the county’s voter registration program.
“Everyone who’s on that (voter registration) database should be a valid and legal voter. But the SAVE database seems to be an imperfect tool to help us get there,” Israel advised NCS.
Before these feedback from Neff, the Justice Department had prevented saying in courtroom that it needed to evaluate the states’ rolls in opposition to the DHS’ immigration knowledge, and its legal professionals denied outright any allegation that a nationwide voter registry was within the works.
David Becker, a former DOJ lawyer who now advises state and native election officers, stated the most recent govt order is solely going to increase the efforts of these combating the DOJ’s voter roll calls for in courtroom.
“As recently as last week, DOJ lawyers were begging the court to believe them that the feds weren’t creating a national voter list, and today, the president makes clear that was the plan all along,” stated Becker, who heads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “The EO will be an exhibit in every case going forward.”
Additionally, the Trump-backed SAVE America Act would power states to periodically run their full voter lists via the DHS system.
DHS “is committed to helping eliminate voter fraud and restore trust in America’s elections by ensuring only U.S. citizens vote,” stated Matthew J. Tragesser, the spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which operates SAVE. “USCIS continues to strengthen the SAVE program and encourages all states to utilize it.”
Trump has positioned outstanding election skeptics in roles throughout the administration to hunt for voter fraud. One of them is the DOJ Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon, who is main the state voter-roll knowledge campaign. She stated final month that an preliminary overview of fifty million to 60 million voter data voluntarily handed over by states discovered greater than 300,000 deceased folks and tens of hundreds of potential noncitizens.
“Now we’re doing our due diligence to identify the extent to which they may or may not have voted,” Dhillon stated.
The particulars of Dhillon’s claims are unclear. The DOJ stated in court filings on March 27 the unredacted voter rolls of states which have complied with DOJ’s requests had not but been shared with every other company, although an settlement for DOJ to share the info with DHS has now been finalized, a DHS official advised NCS on Saturday. Still, the statistics put out by the administration to date present a totally different image of the potential for foreigners flooding the voter rolls.
Since April 2025, when states used the overhauled SAVE system on their very own to verify their rolls, it flagged 21,000 potential non-citizens out of 60 million names submitted to this system, DHS advised NCS — a fee of 0.00035 p.c. And that is earlier than extra efforts by states to examine and assess whether or not these flagged voters are literally non-citizens, which DHS’ personal directions for utilizing the SAVE instrument say states should do.
One Democratic secretary of state stated they’re involved that the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress might use the outcomes of the SAVE system’s voter roll queries as a pretext for refusing to seat victorious Democratic candidates after subsequent 12 months’s midterm elections.
“The hypothetical is a state being forced to run our voter file through the deeply flawed SAVE system, and the federal government producing a list of voters that they say are not eligible,” the secretary of state stated, requesting anonymity to communicate candidly.
States can be pressured to take both aggressive and rushed steps to confirm the citizenship of every of these folks earlier than canceling their registrations — injecting confusion within the lead-up to the election whereas doubtlessly chilling voters — or to refuse to go together with the administration’s calls for for the purge, the official stated. But that latter route invitations the chance that the Republican-led Congress will refuse to seat a Democratic member elected within the contested state.
“So, it really places states in a very difficult position of having to scramble without adequate resources to comply with an unconstitutional and unlawful mandate or potentially risk shenanigans in the certification process,” the official stated.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly questioned why state election officers would withhold the lists if, as they are saying, there aren’t important numbers of noncitizens registered. GOP lawmakers proceed to argue Democrats are resisting election modifications as a result of they need noncitizens to vote.
Election officers who’ve declined the division’s requests for voter knowledge have additionally pointed to the privateness protections in their very own state legal guidelines for confidential data gathered from their residents, a concern that was exacerbated by repeated situations of Department of Government Efficiency associates mishandling delicate knowledge. Earlier this 12 months, the Justice Department stated that a DOGE worker had agreed to share delicate Social Security knowledge with an unidentified political group for the needs of difficult election outcomes.
“That development reinforces the importance of careful stewardship of sensitive voter information,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, stated in a February letter, denying the Justice Department’s knowledge request. “While I appreciate the Department’s representations that Idaho’s data will be safeguarded, I cannot take that now-apparent risk in the absence of clear legal duty to do so.”
The Justice Department sued Idaho for its voter roll knowledge Wednesday.