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

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Even as Democratic officials fight efforts in courtThe Trump administration has run millions of voter records through government databases to determine voter eligibility, a process that critics worry could result in valid voters being purged from the rolls before the November election.

At least 67 million records, primarily in Republican-controlled states, went through a beefed-up verification program by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, with tens of thousands of them flagged as potential non-citizens or deceased persons. Some states only allow people a month to prove their eligibility, while others suspend it immediately.

The national sweep of state voter rolls is part of a broader effort by Republican President Donald Trump to federalize certain election functions and promote your message The elections were marred by non-citizen votes. examples of this 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 dismissed, by the time they find out and correct it, they may miss out on the opportunity to vote in that election,” said Freda Levenson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The group is challenging an Ohio law requiring monthly checks of the DHS system.

Voters like 29-year-old Anthony Nel are caught in the middle.

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

“I said, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that you have a passport,'” he said in an interview.

All electoral rolls of the states were examined

Trump was trying to do this Overhauling US electionsincluding calling federal list of verified votersand the Department of Justice pushed the states Submitting unredacted voter information for bulk checks through the DHS program known as SAVE.

There is a Ministry of Justice states sued Those who refuse, say the government is trying to make sure they comply with federal law and have accurate voter lists. States are already taking few steps To maintain the integrity of electoral rolls.

SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Authorizations, was created under an immigration law that requires DHS to 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 voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded search capabilities, checking 60 million records in a year, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services. This figure does not include the additional 7.4 million records from North Carolina. Republicans control state election boardthese were recently run through the system.

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

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

Schwab’s support is notable because he was once one, too. openly skeptical that non-citizens represent a significant threat of voter fraud.

Republicans talk about hits from SAVE searches

Citizenship and Immigration Services said about 24,000 potential non-citizens were identified in a check of 60 million voter registrations. Those checks also identified about 350,000 people who appeared to have died, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told Fox News in a recent interview.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections said its check identified another 34,000 registered voters who were potentially dead.

Even if all of them were eventually confirmed as ineligible, they would represent a small percentage of the total registered voters. For non-citizens, the figure would be approximately 400 per 1 million registrations. The approximately 384,000 people identified as potentially deceased in approximately 67 million records is 1%.

Some voters were marked incorrectly.

In Dallas, election officials recently canceled the registration of 68-year-old attorney and voting rights advocate Domingo Garcia without explanation. He has been voting regularly for 50 years, most recently in the state’s March 3 primary, and he suspects authorities have concluded he is dead.

“I shouldn’t have been on any list,” he said.

False positives occur

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

Nel, a 29-year-old university administrator, is named in one of the lawsuits recently filed against the Department of Justice in the District of Columbia. The report alleges that the administration conducted an “illegal and unprecedented search” for “confidential voter data on millions of Americans.”

Advocates also argue that eligible voters will be disenfranchised due to hits resulting from outdated or incomplete data.

Nel came to the United States from South Africa with her parents when she was 8 years old. His parents became citizens when he was 16, making him a citizen as well. He said he has been voting regularly since he was 18.

But in October he received a letter in a white envelope that appeared to him to be junk mail. Texas was said to have identified 18 million voter registrations as a potential non-citizen through a SAVE check. He had 30 days to prove otherwise; He had missed the deadline due to the time required to obtain a new passport.

“It is clear that the process they initiated for this reason is not working,” he said.

Advocates say SAVE system is first step

Republican officials said the administration did not present SAVE searches as flawless. Instead, they said, it identified records that needed further investigation.

In Kansas, Schwab’s office is still investigating the list of flagged records and has not yet released the number of hits of potentially ineligible voters from a SAVE check of the state’s 2 million records.

When his office forwards the flagged names to county officials, a state law that took effect this year requires the records be listed as “pending” or “pending” until the cases are resolved. A person with a flag can still vote, but the ballot is set aside for further review and may not be counted.

Texas must give people with flagged registrations 30 days to prove they are properly registered. North Carolina will require county boards of elections to hold hearings for people whose registrations are challenged before their registrations are revoked.

A new Ohio law requires local boards of elections to “immediately” revoke the registrations of people the secretary of state finds to be noncitizens during registration checks, which the official must conduct at least monthly.

Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said in an email that people’s voting rights are not in danger because “all they have to do to immediately restore their registration status is show proof of citizenship.”

But ACLU attorney Levenson described the approach differently.

“Shoot first, ask questions later,” he 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.