Trump is trying to build a massive voter database. Election officials are afraid of what he’ll do with it
The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against alleged voter fraud, taking new steps toward building a national citizen database and ramping up its hunt for suspected noncitizen voters — all under the banner of “election integrity.”
The latest escalation — including an executive order, a newly empowered prosecutor and a growing raft of lawsuits — has drawn fresh warnings from critics who say the administration’s push to amass vast troves of voter data from across the country could be used to block eligible Americans from voting and stoke fresh doubts about the legitimacy of the 2026 midterm elections.
The Justice Department has finalized a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to give DHS sensitive voter-roll data the administration has demanded from states to be checked against a citizenship verification program that has been criticized for its inaccuracies.
Trump officials last week floated a new potential pressure tactic on states that so far have refused to hand over their full voter rolls: Conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security grants on sharing voter data, requiring states to run their registration rolls through the federal immigration records system or lose the funding.
Heather Honey — an election skeptic brought into DHS to work on “election integrity” — raised the idea on a Thursday call with Federal Emergency Management Agency leaders who run the grant programs, according to three sources familiar with the call. As of Friday, it hadn’t been implemented. Last year, at DHS’ direction, FEMA added requirements that states to spend at least 3% of those grants on “enhancing election security.”
A DHS spokesperson said they had “no changes to the Homeland Security Grant Program to announce at this time.”
For months, the Justice Department has tried to assure courts that the administration was not seeking to assemble a national voter registration list with its demands that states provide sensitive information about the voters on their rolls. But on Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order focused on citizenship data and mail ballots that appears to do just that, in the face of the Constitution’s command that states — not the federal government — are the primary administrators of elections.
Also on Tuesday, two days before Trump ousted her, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had deputized a US attorney who previously questioned Trump’s 2020 defeat to work on elections issues. In his new role, Dan Bishop, the top federal prosecutor for Middle District of North Carolina, will examine voter registration data obtained by the administration and search for noncitizen voters, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
The administration has now sued 30 states and the District of Columbia because they would not produce their unredacted voter lists voluntarily. After months of proceedings in those cases, a DOJ lawyer in a March 26 hearing acknowledged for the first time in court that their goals in obtaining the confidential data included letting the Department of Homeland Security scan those rolls for ineligible names. The DHS citizenship verification program the administration is using for the review is known to give an inflated number of potential noncitizens on the rolls.
“The issue with data is that you can find ways to make it tell a certain story,” said Elisabeth Frost, the litigation chair of Elias Law Group, which has intervened on behalf of voters to oppose the Justice Department in its lawsuits seeking 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 office, Trump has continued to claim US elections are plagued by fraud — including large numbers of noncitizens voting — tasking multiple agencies with hunting down evidence that foreigners are tainting the results. Noncitizens face the risk of prosecution and deportation if they vote, and voters in federal elections are required to sign legally binding declarations affirming their citizenship.
Earlier this year, Trump called for the federal government to “take over” and “nationalize” voting in certain places. The latest unilateral push comes as Republicans have signaled their unwillingness to change Senate filibuster rules to pass the “SAVE America Act,” which would enact sweeping changes to elections. Republicans are also weighing an uphill effort to pass a version of that voting legislation on a party-line vote through a complicated budget process known as reconciliation.
Democrats, advocates and state officials swiftly sued to block the latest Trump directive in court on and election experts expect courts to block it, just as they halted large parts of his 2025 election executive order seeking new citizenship verification requirements for voter registration and stricter mail-in voting rules.
The White House defended the DOJ’s efforts to obtain state voter lists, telling CNN the results will help ensure states comply with federal election law and prevent American citizens 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 said. “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 executive order is the clearest assertion yet of the president’s desire to have his administration — and not states — decide who receives a ballot.
His directive would create “citizenship lists” for every state by drawing on citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security data and other federal databases to determine who is eligible to vote in federal elections.
But the federal government does not have the tools to amass its own complete list of eligible voters given the limits of its internal data, election experts say, nor does it have that legal authority. Smaller-scale attempts to use immigration data to verify voter eligibility, absent additional investigation by state and local authorities, have wrongly flagged citizens as noncitizens, in part because the outdated data doesn’t always capture when people are later naturalized.
Last year, the Trump administration quietly revamped a federal program known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) that historically was used for public benefit verifications but is now a tool offered to states to search for potential noncitizens on their rolls and one the DOJ now says it will be using itself to review registration lists. The overhaul expanded the databases feeding into the program, linking immigration records with Social Security databases and passport information.
More than two dozen states voluntarily use the SAVE system to help with their list maintenance, and even that state-controlled exercise has faced pushback.
Texas was sued March 26 by Latino voter advocates who allege the state’s use of the “half-baked” and “unreliable” federal tool has led to illegal purges of citizens from the rolls.
Still, the Trump administration wants to use the system to do its own reviews of state voter rolls, DOJ Voting Section acting chief Eric Neff told a Rhode Island court on March 26.
A proposed agreement the DOJ offered last year to state election chiefs who were leery of producing the sensitive voter information said the states would have just 45 days to remove voters the government had deemed to be ineligible. Only two states were willing to sign the proposal, but another 15 have provided the data with agreeing to those terms, the Justice Department has said in court.
“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 asked for anonymity to avoid the administration’s ire, told CNN earlier this year.
At the court hearing in Rhode Island, Neff assured a skeptical judge that the DHS SAVE system is “in effect 100% accurate.”
But state and local officials who have used the system have said that it’s ensnared a significant number of citizens.
Texas officials last fall identified more than 2,700 potential noncitizens after running their full list of more than 18 million voters in the SAVE database. But in Travis County, which includes Austin, 11 of the 97 voters initially flagged had already provided proof of citizenship when they registered with the state driver’s license division, while the county’s investigative process is still ongoing for the others, said 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 told CNN.
Before those comments from Neff, the Justice Department had avoided saying in court that it wanted to compare the states’ rolls against the DHS’ immigration data, and its lawyers denied outright any allegation that a national voter registry was in the works.
David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now advises state and local election officials, said the latest executive order is only going to boost the efforts of those fighting the DOJ’s voter roll demands in court.
“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,” said 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 force states to periodically run their full voter lists through 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,” said 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 placed prominent election skeptics in roles across the administration to hunt for voter fraud. One of them is the DOJ Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon, who is leading the state voter-roll data crusade. She said last month that an initial review of 50 million to 60 million voter records voluntarily handed over by states found more than 300,000 deceased people and tens of thousands of potential noncitizens.
“Now we’re doing our due diligence to identify the extent to which they may or may not have voted,” Dhillon said.
The particulars of Dhillon’s claims are unclear. The DOJ said in court filings on March 27 the unredacted voter rolls of states that have complied with DOJ’s requests had not yet been shared with any other agency, though an agreement for DOJ to share the data with DHS has now been finalized, a DHS official told CNN on Saturday. Still, the statistics put out by the administration so far show a different picture of the possibility of foreigners flooding the voter rolls.
Since April 2025, when states used the overhauled SAVE system on their own to check their rolls, it flagged 21,000 potential non-citizens out of 60 million names submitted to the program, DHS told CNN — a rate of 0.00035 percent. And that is before additional efforts by states to investigate and assess whether those flagged voters are actually non-citizens, which DHS’ own instructions for using the SAVE tool say states must do.
One Democratic secretary of state said they are concerned that the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress could use the results of the SAVE system’s voter roll queries as a pretext for refusing to seat victorious Democratic candidates after next year’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 said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly.
States would be forced to take either aggressive and rushed steps to verify the citizenship of each of those people before canceling their registrations — injecting confusion in the lead-up to the election while potentially chilling voters — or to refuse to go along with the administration’s demands for the purge, the official said. But that latter route invites the possibility that the Republican-led Congress will refuse to seat a Democratic member elected in 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 said.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly questioned why state election officials would withhold the lists if, as they say, there aren’t significant numbers of noncitizens registered. GOP lawmakers continue to argue Democrats are resisting election changes because they want noncitizens to vote.
Election officials who have declined the department’s requests for voter data have also pointed to the privacy protections in their own state laws for confidential information gathered from their residents, a concern that was exacerbated by repeated instances of Department of Government Efficiency affiliates mishandling sensitive data. Earlier this year, the Justice Department said that a DOGE employee had agreed to share sensitive Social Security data with an unidentified political group for the purposes of challenging election results.
“That development reinforces the importance of careful stewardship of sensitive voter information,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said in a February letter, denying the Justice Department’s data 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 data Wednesday.
