By John Hanna
Contributing Writer
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 message that elections are marred by noncitizen voting, although instances of that are rare.
Many voting and civil rights advocates say the effort is being driven almost exclusively by partisan politics. Immigrants, including naturalized citizens, are twice as likely to say the Democratic Party represents their political views better (32%) than the Republican Party (16%), according to KFF, a San Francisco-based policy research and polling institute.
Civil rights advocates also say the Department of Homeland Security 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 Department of Homeland Security system.
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 Department of Homeland Security 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 Department of Homeland Security help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, 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.
Voting right advocates say inaccurate or outdated information has threatened voters’ standings in North Carolina, Texas, Kansas and Ohio, spawning at least six federal lawsuits over SAVE checks, either against the Trump administration or states using the program.
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.
John Hanna writes for the Associated Press. Wave staff and Associated Press writers Jack Dura and Gary Robertson contributed to this report.
