Trump administration promote program to check voter eligibility. Critics fear a midterm purge

Anthony Nel poses for The Associated Press on Thursday, April 30, 2026, in Denton, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

2026-05-17T11:06:01Z

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Even as Democratic officials fight the effort in court, the Trump administration has run millions of voter registrations through government databases to determine their eligibility in a process that critics worry could end up purging valid voters from the rolls before the November elections.

At least 67 million registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled states, have gone through a beefed-up verification program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and tens of thousands of those have been flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died. Some states allow only a month for people to prove their eligibility and others suspend it immediately.

The scanning of state voter rolls at the national level is part of a broader effort by Republican President Donald Trump to federalize certain election functions and promote his messaging that elections are marred by noncitizen voting, even though instances of that are rare. Voting and civil rights advocates say the DHS system is error-prone and can mistakenly flag people who are eligible to vote.

“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. The group is challenging an Ohio law requiring monthly checks with the DHS system.

Voters such as 29-year-old Anthony Nel have been caught in the middle.

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The native of South Africa, who became a citizen more than a decade ago, was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter file through the DHS verification system. Nel’s local election office in Denton, north of Dallas, temporarily canceled his registration last fall while he was waiting for a new passport to replace an expired one.

“I’m like, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that the passport exists,’” he said in an interview.

States’ entire voter rolls reviewed

Trump has been trying to overhaul U.S. elections, including calling for a federal list of verified voters, and his Department of Justice has pushed states to hand over unredacted voter information for mass checks through the DHS program known as SAVE.

The Justice Department has sued states that refuse, saying the government is trying to ensure that they are complying with federal law and have accurate voter lists. States already take a number of steps to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls.

SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of DHS, said more than 1,300 agencies use it.

At least 25 states have used SAVE to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities, and 60 million registrations were checked in a year’s time, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services. That figure does not include an additional 7.4 million registrations from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board, that were recently run through the system.

Citizenship and Immigration Services said in an emailed statement that it is “committed to helping eliminate voter fraud” to restore Americans’ trust in their elections.

“SAVE is one of the most important tools states have to verify voter information,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, recently told a U.S. House committee examining how states keep voter rolls clean.

Schwab’s endorsement is notable because he once was publicly skeptical that noncitizens represented a significant voter fraud threat.

Republicans cite hits from SAVE searches

Citizenship and Immigration Services said the 60 million voter registration checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said during a recent Fox News interview that those checks also identified about 350,000 people who appear to have died.

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections said its check had identified another 34,000 registered voters who are potentially deceased.

Even if all those eventually were verified as ineligible, they would represent small percentages of total registered voters. The figure for noncitizens would be about 400 for every 1 million registrations. Some 384,000 people identified as potentially deceased in about 67 million registrations is a fraction of 1%.

Some voters have been mistakenly flagged.

In Dallas, election officials recently canceled the registration of Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old lawyer and voting rights activist, without explanation. He has been voting regularly for 50 years, most recently in the state’s March 3 primary, and suspects that officials concluded he was deceased.

“I should not have been on any lists,” he said.

False positives are popping up

Voting rights advocates have filed at least six federal lawsuits over SAVE checks, either against the Trump administration or states using the program.

Nel, a 29-year-old college administrator, is a plaintiff in one of them, filed recently in the District of Columbia against the Justice Department. It alleges an “illegal and unprecedented quest” by the administration for “millions of Americans’ confidential voter data.”

Lawyers also argue that eligible voters will be disenfranchised by hits from outdated or incomplete data.

Nel came to the United States from South Africa with his parents at age 8. His parents became citizens when he was 16, making him a citizen, as well. He said he has voted regularly since he was 18.

Yet he received a letter in October in a white envelope that looked to him like junk mail. It told him he had been identified as a potential noncitizen through a SAVE check of Texas’ 18 million voter registrations. He had 30 days to prove otherwise — a deadline he missed because of the time it took to get a new passport.

“It’s clear that this process that they’ve put into place for this doesn’t work,” he said.

Defenders say the SAVE system is a first step

Republican officials said the administration does not portray SAVE searches as foolproof. Instead, it identifies registrations that should be further investigated, they said.

In Kansas, Schwab’s office is still investigating its list of flagged registrations and has yet to disclose the number of hits of potentially ineligible voters from a SAVE check of the state’s 2 million registrations.

Once his office forwards flagged names to county officials, a state law enacted this year requires them to list the registrations as “in suspense” or “pending” until the cases are resolved. A flagged person still can vote, but the ballot is set aside for further review and might not be counted.

Texas is supposed to give people with flagged registrations 30 days to prove they are properly registered. North Carolina will require county elections boards to give people whose registrations are challenged a hearing before they can be canceled.

A new Ohio law requires local election boards to “promptly” cancel the registrations of people whom the secretary of state identifies as noncitizens during registration checks that the official is required to make at least monthly.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an 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.”

But Levenson, the ACLU lawyer, described the approach differently.

“Shoot first and ask questions later,” she said.

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Associated Press writers Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Gary Robertson, in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

JOHN HANNA Hanna covers politics and state government in Kansas for The Associated Press. He’s worked for the AP in Topeka since 1986. twitter mailto