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Admin Pushing Voter Eligibility Checks 05/18 06:01
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.
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.
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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