Trump administration voter-eligibility checks raise purge fears ahead of midterms

Trump administration’s SAVE checks expand as lawsuits mount

The Trump administration has run millions of voter registrations through a Homeland Security system that is meant to verify eligibility, a step that has prompted fears among critics that the flags could translate into the removal or postponement of valid voters before the November elections. The checks have continued even as Democratic officials and advocates fight the effort in court, arguing that eligibility decisions based on database matches can go wrong and take too long to correct once a voter learns they were flagged.

According to the Associated Press, at least 67 million registrations have been processed through the Department of Homeland Security’s eligibility verification program, known as SAVE, with tens of thousands flagged as potential noncitizens or as people who have died. The program has been used in different ways by states, including rules that give flagged voters differing amounts of time to prove eligibility and requirements that range from immediate suspension to longer periods before any cancellation.

Freda Levenson, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said in the reporting that “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.” Levenson’s group is challenging an Ohio law that requires monthly checks using the DHS system.

The concerns are not confined to policy debates. The reporting includes examples of voters who say they were caught in the middle of the verification and correction process. One case described in Texas involved Anthony Nel, a 29-year-old South Africa-born citizen who was flagged as a potential noncitizen after Texas ran its voter file through the verification system, prompting his Denton-area local election office to temporarily cancel his registration while he waited for a replacement passport.

Nel said in an interview that “I’m like, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that the passport exists,’” and he later described getting a letter indicating he had been identified through a SAVE check and given a 30-day deadline to prove he was properly registered. He missed the deadline, the reporting says, while it took time for his new passport to arrive, and he is listed as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia against the Justice Department.

How SAVE works and why the administration backs it

The scanning of state voter rolls at the national level is part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump to federalize certain election functions and to promote messaging that voting is harmed by noncitizen participation, the AP reported. The Justice Department has sued states that refuse to provide unredacted voter information for the mass checks through SAVE, arguing the federal government needs accurate voter lists and that states must comply with federal law.

SAVE stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. It was created under an immigration law that required DHS to help agencies prevent noncitizens from receiving government benefits. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of DHS, has said more than 1,300 agencies use the system for benefits-related screening.

Citizenship and Immigration Services told AP in an emailed statement that it is “committed to helping eliminate voter fraud” and that SAVE is used by states to verify voter information. The reporting also cites Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, saying he considers SAVE “one of the most important tools states have to verify voter information,” in remarks to a U.S. House committee.

Schwab’s endorsement stands out in the reporting because he had previously said publicly that noncitizens did not represent a significant voter fraud threat. The AP also reported that, after the Trump administration expanded search abilities, at least 25 states used SAVE to check voter rolls starting in April 2025.

Hits from SAVE and what states do next

Citizenship and Immigration Services said that the checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens from 60 million voter registration checks. The AP reported that Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said during a Fox News interview that those checks also identified about 350,000 people who appear to have died.

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections, according to the reporting, said its check identified about 34,000 registered voters who were potentially deceased. Even if all such flags were verified as ineligible, the AP reported, they would remain small fractions of total registered voters, framing the noncitizen estimate as roughly 400 for every 1 million registrations and the death-related estimate as less than 1% of registrations in the data cited.

Still, advocates and attorneys argue that false positives can disenfranchise eligible voters. The AP cited a case in Dallas involving Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old lawyer and voting rights activist whose registration was canceled recently without explanation, which he suspected occurred because officials concluded he was deceased. The reporting says he has voted regularly for decades, most recently in Texas’ March 3 primary, and told AP he “should not have been on any lists.”

The AP said at least six federal lawsuits have been filed over SAVE checks, including suits by voters and advocacy groups against the Trump administration or states using the program. In addition to Nel’s case, lawyers argue the hits could be tied to outdated or incomplete records and lead to eligible voters being removed or left unable to complete deadlines.

Republican officials, the reporting said, argue that SAVE hits are not intended as final determinations. Instead, they identify registrations for additional investigation. In Kansas, Schwab’s office is still reviewing flagged names and, the AP reported, has not yet disclosed how many potentially ineligible voters were identified from SAVE checks of the state’s 2 million voter registrations.

State deadlines, suspensions, and court challenges

After state officials receive flagged names from the SAVE program, local procedures vary. The AP reported that in Kansas, a state law enacted this year requires county officials to list certain registrations as “in suspense” or “pending” until the cases are resolved, with the AP saying a flagged person can still vote while ballots are set aside for further review and might not be counted.

In Texas, the reporting said people with flagged registrations are supposed to get 30 days to prove they are properly registered. In North Carolina, the AP said county elections boards must provide a hearing to people whose registrations are challenged before registrations can be canceled.

Ohio’s new law, the AP reported, requires local election boards to “promptly” cancel registrations of people whom the secretary of state identifies as noncitizens during registration checks that the secretary is required to make at least monthly. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, told AP via email that people’s voting rights are not in danger because “all they need to do to immediately restore their registration status is show proof of citizenship.”

Levenson disputed the approach, saying in the reporting, “Shoot first and ask questions later.”

For now, the Trump administration’s use of SAVE and the resulting state actions are still being tested through legal challenges filed by advocates and affected voters, with decisions about what database matches mean—match by match, deadline by deadline—turning into a central question ahead of the November elections.