The Trump administration has run at least 67 million voter registrations through a Department of Homeland Security eligibility-verification system, flagging tens of thousands of registrations as potential noncitizens or deceased voters, the Associated Press reported on May 17. The SAVE program — short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — was originally created under immigration law to help agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens, but DHS significantly expanded its search capabilities after April 2025, enabling mass voter-roll checks in at least 25 states.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS arm that administers SAVE, said the 60 million checks conducted over the past year identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens, according to the AP. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said during a Fox News interview that the checks also flagged roughly 350,000 registrations as potentially belonging to deceased individuals. North Carolina election officials separately identified an additional 34,000 potentially deceased registrations after running 7.4 million state records through the system.
Even if every flagged registration were verified as ineligible, the numbers would represent small fractions of the total. The potential-noncitizen figure works out to roughly 400 per 1 million registrations, and the combined potentially deceased count — about 384,000 across roughly 67 million registrations — is a fraction of 1 percent.
Voting-rights groups have filed at least six federal lawsuits challenging the SAVE-based checks. “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, which is challenging a state law requiring monthly SAVE checks.
The experience of Anthony Nel, a 29-year-old college administrator in Denton, Texas, illustrates what can go wrong. Nel came to the United States from South Africa at age 8 and became a citizen when his parents naturalized a decade ago. He has voted regularly since turning 18. Last fall, he received a letter in an envelope that looked like junk mail informing him a SAVE check had flagged his registration and giving him 30 days to provide proof of citizenship. His passport had expired, and the replacement did not arrive in time. His local election office temporarily canceled his registration.
“I’m like, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that the passport exists,’” Nel told the AP. “It’s clear that this process that they’ve put into place for this doesn’t work.”
Nel is a plaintiff in a recently filed lawsuit in the District of Columbia against the Justice Department, which alleges “an illegal and unprecedented quest” by the administration for “millions of Americans’ confidential voter data.”
In Dallas, election officials recently canceled the registration of Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old lawyer and voting-rights activist who has voted regularly for 50 years, without explanation. Garcia suspects officials concluded he was deceased. “I should not have been on any lists,” he said.
Republican officials have defended the SAVE program. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican who previously expressed public skepticism that noncitizen voting posed a significant fraud problem, told a U.S. House committee that “SAVE is one of the most important tools states have to verify voter information.” Schwab’s office is still investigating its list of flagged registrations and has not disclosed how many potentially ineligible voters the Kansas check identified.
Administration defenders emphasize that SAVE searches are not presented as conclusive. The system flags registrations for further investigation rather than automatically removing voters, they say.
State procedures for handling flagged registrations vary significantly. Texas is supposed to give voters 30 days to prove eligibility. North Carolina requires county election boards to hold hearings before cancellations. A new Ohio law requires local election boards to “promptly” cancel registrations the secretary of state identifies as noncitizen — checks the law requires at least monthly.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an email that “all they need to do to immediately restore their registration status is show proof of citizenship.” Levenson, the ACLU lawyer, described the approach as “shoot first and ask questions later.”
The Justice Department has sued states that refuse to hand over unredacted voter information for SAVE checks, arguing it is ensuring compliance with federal law and accurate voter lists. States already take multiple steps under existing law to maintain the accuracy of their rolls.