{"id":566049,"date":"2026-04-05T13:20:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T13:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/566049\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T13:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T13:20:13","slug":"why-trump-is-trying-to-build-a-massive-voter-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/566049\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Trump is trying to build a massive voter database"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against alleged voter fraud<\/a>, taking new steps toward building a national citizen database and ramping up its hunt for suspected noncitizen voters \u2014 all under the banner of \u201celection integrity.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The latest escalation \u2014 including an executive order<\/a>, a newly empowered prosecutor and a growing raft of lawsuits \u2014 has drawn fresh warnings from critics who say the administration\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n Heather Honey \u2014 an election skeptic brought into DHS to work on \u201celection integrity\u201d \u2014 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\u2019t been implemented. Last year, at DHS\u2019 direction, FEMA added requirements that states to spend at least 3% of those grants on \u201cenhancing election security.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n A DHS spokesperson said they had \u201cno changes to the Homeland Security Grant Program to announce at this time.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s command that states \u2014 not the federal government \u2014 are the primary administrators of elections.\n <\/p>\n

\n Also on Tuesday, two days before Trump ousted her, Attorney General Pam Bondi<\/a> announced that she had deputized a US attorney who previously questioned Trump\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe issue with data is that you can find ways to make it tell a certain story,\u201d 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. \u201cIf the methods you\u2019re 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Since returning to office, Trump has continued to claim US elections are plagued by fraud \u2014 including large numbers of noncitizens voting \u2014 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n Earlier this year, Trump called for the federal government to \u201ctake over\u201d and \u201cnationalize\u201d voting in certain places. The latest unilateral push comes as Republicans have signaled their unwillingness to change Senate filibuster rules to pass the \u201cSAVE America Act<\/a>,\u201d 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.\n <\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n The White House defended the DOJ\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cElection 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,\u201d White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The new Trump executive order is the clearest assertion yet of the president\u2019s desire to have his administration \u2014 and not states \u2014 decide who receives a ballot.\n <\/p>\n

\n His directive would create \u201ccitizenship lists\u201d 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019t always capture when people are later naturalized.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n Texas was sued March 26 by Latino voter advocates who allege the state\u2019s use of the \u201chalf-baked\u201d and \u201cunreliable\u201d federal tool has led to illegal purges of citizens from the rolls.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThey 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,\u201d one Republican state elections chief, who asked for anonymity to avoid the administration\u2019s ire, told CNN earlier this year.\n <\/p>\n

\n At the court hearing in Rhode Island, Neff assured a skeptical judge that the DHS SAVE system is \u201cin effect 100% accurate.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n But state and local officials who have used the system have said that it\u2019s ensnared a significant number of citizens.\n <\/p>\n

\n Texas officials last fall identified more than 2,700<\/a> 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\u2019s license division, while the county\u2019s investigative process is still ongoing for the others, said Celia Israel, who maintains the county\u2019s voter registration program.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cEveryone who\u2019s 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,\u201d Israel told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\n Before those comments from Neff, the Justice Department had avoided saying in court that it wanted to compare the states\u2019 rolls against the DHS\u2019 immigration data, and its lawyers denied outright any allegation that a national voter registry was in the works.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s voter roll demands in court.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cAs recently as last week, DOJ lawyers were begging the court to believe them that the feds weren\u2019t creating a national voter list, and today, the president makes clear that was the plan all along,\u201d said Becker, who heads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. \u201cThe EO will be an exhibit in every case going forward.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Additionally, the Trump-backed SAVE America Act would force states to periodically run their full voter lists through the DHS system.\n <\/p>\n

\n DHS \u201cis committed to helping eliminate voter fraud and restore trust in America\u2019s elections by ensuring only U.S. citizens vote,\u201d said Matthew J. Tragesser, the spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which operates SAVE. \u201cUSCIS continues to strengthen the SAVE program and encourages all states to utilize it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cNow we\u2019re doing our due diligence to identify the extent to which they may or may not have voted,\u201d Dhillon said.\n <\/p>\n

\"Assistant<\/p>\n

\n The particulars of Dhillon\u2019s claims are unclear. The DOJ said in court filings<\/a> on March 27 the unredacted voter rolls of states that have complied with DOJ\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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 \u2014 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\u2019 own instructions for using the SAVE tool say states must do.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s voter roll queries as a pretext for refusing to seat victorious Democratic candidates after next year\u2019s midterm elections.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d the secretary of state said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly.\n <\/p>\n

\n States would be forced to take either aggressive and rushed steps to verify the citizenship of each of those people before canceling their registrations \u2014 injecting confusion in the lead-up to the election while potentially chilling voters \u2014 or to refuse to go along with the administration\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cSo, 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,\u201d the official said.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump and his allies have repeatedly questioned why state election officials would withhold the lists if, as they say, there aren\u2019t significant numbers of noncitizens registered. GOP lawmakers continue to argue Democrats are resisting election changes because they want noncitizens to vote.\n <\/p>\n

\n Election officials who have declined the department\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat development reinforces the importance of careful stewardship of sensitive voter information,\u201d Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said in a February letter, denying the Justice Department\u2019s data request. \u201cWhile I appreciate the Department\u2019s representations that Idaho\u2019s data will be safeguarded, I cannot take that now-apparent risk in the absence of clear legal duty to do so.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The Justice Department sued Idaho for its voter roll data Wednesday.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against alleged voter fraud, taking new steps toward building a national…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":566050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-566049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}