Just under three weeks after being elected to his first term as president of the United States, Donald Trump took to Twitter to claim he’d been cheated.
While he had won the office through his strength in the electoral college, Trump wanted to make something clear: he also believed he’d won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
This rhetoric — that dark forces were conspiring to rig democratic outcomes against him — has endured through Trump’s two subsequent presidential campaigns, bolstered by persistent belief among Republicans that election fraud is rampant. Trump’s attacks eventually sharpened into the more specific charge that illegal immigrants were casting millions of fraudulent ballots for his Democratic opponents across the country.
But over the past decade, these political attacks have always crashed headlong into an uncomfortable reality: the facts are not in his favor. All the data we have tells us that non-citizen voting is rare. So rare that exhaustive post-election audits by Republican state officials sympathetic to Trump’s cause have only found handfuls of noncitizens even registered out of millions of registered voters. The vast majority of identified registered noncitizens never cast an actual ballot.
In the past, these inconvenient stats and metrics have prevented Trump and Republicans from winning court battles that seek to invalidate or cast suspicion on batches of voters for supposedly not having proven citizenship.
Now, with the executive branch once again under his control, some election officials and experts worry that Trump is attempting to create a new set of metrics that can better support his political claims of voter fraud.
Effective tool or ‘poor fit’ for verifying voters?
Last month, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly announced that a federal database typically used for naturalized citizens to seek benefits had been repurposed as a tool to check state voter registration systems for signs of noncitizens.
The news came less than a month after the agency revealed that staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency had implemented a “comprehensive optimization” of the database, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), that included the elimination of state-paid fees for searches and other unspecified changes to streamline mass status checks, integrate criminal records information and “break down silos for accurate results,” according to DOGE officials.
Further changes announced by the agency in May will allow states to run searches using Social Security numbers and conduct bulk searches. The explicit purpose of these modifications, as USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser put it in a statement, is to “help identify and stop aliens from hijacking our elections.”
Some Republican state election officials have embraced the moves, saying even the perception of fraud warrants tougher verification procedures. David Scanlan, New Hampshire’s Republican secretary of state, called it a “voter confidence issue.”
“Voters in this country have a right to know who is participating in elections and that those individuals are qualified. SAVE is a tool that can help accomplish that,” he wrote in an emailed statement.
But other election officials and experts have expressed bewilderment as to why the Department of Homeland Security would attempt to use SAVE — an incomplete, often out-of-date database — to identify potential noncitizen voters.
Others expressed more direct concerns that the SAVE changes appear to be the first steps in a larger plan by the White House to create new metrics that lend support to Trump’s unproven claims that noncitizens are voting en masse for Democrats.
At the same time, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies have begun filing lawsuits and accusing multiple states of having voter registration databases that are out of compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a law that dictates how much federal election grant funding each state receives annually.
The Trump administration has already tried to use congressionally mandated funding to pressure states into adopting his preferred election policies. Numerous sources told CyberScoop that changes to SAVE, actions by the Department of Justice, and threats to withhold federal grants could create intense pressure on states to comply with White House demands. They also worried that inaccurate information from SAVE might be used in federal lawsuits or in the political arena to justify stricter federal actions related to voting.
Jasleen Singh, counsel for the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, was blunt in her view that the SAVE database changes look like another step in Trump’s yearslong quest “to unearth supposed noncitizen voters” casting ballots for Democrats in droves.
“Despite that being a rare occurrence, we have multiple checks in place to ensure only citizens are voting, but this seems to be the latest tool that’s being employed in furtherance of that lie,” Singh said.
She identified two recent changes to SAVE that raise concerns about possible voter disenfranchisement: allowing states to make bulk inquiries and permitting searches using Social Security numbers.
Since 2009, at least 10 states have used SAVE for voter registration and maintaining voter lists, although they may not have used it frequently. In a March letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, a group of 21 Republican secretaries of state complained that SAVE was unwieldy and requested improvements, like the recently added bulk search feature.
But Singh argued that SAVE is a poor fit for verifying U.S. voter citizenship status. The database only includes records for individuals who have previously interacted with the U.S. immigration system, which means it may miss many noncitizens who have not had such interactions or allow for searches related to citizens who have never interacted with the immigration system.
Meanwhile, the switch to bulk inquiries could potentially allow states to run “massive” searches using their voter file that “returns incredibly high numbers of non-matches in the SAVE system,” she said.
“So there’s a risk that a state could misuse the program, create the false impression that there are many, many noncitizens on the [voter] rolls, because SAVE can’t verify citizenship, and then demand proof of citizenship from people who just aren’t showing up in the search at all,” Singh posited.
Democracy Docket, a news outlet focused on elections founded by Democratic power lawyer Marc Elias, reported the contents of an email sent to Election Integrity Network — a voter fraud conspiracy group led by Cleta Mitchell — advertising an upcoming Zoom meeting with USCIS associate chief David Jennings to discuss how SAVE could be used “to aid in assuring noncitizens are removed from our voter rolls.”
States verify citizenship of registered voters in a variety of different ways, most commonly through their motor vehicle departments as residents get driver’s licenses or other documentation. States that have conducted extensive audits of their own voter rolls, in some cases going back decades, have typically found no more than a dozen or so cases, with almost none of the people found actually casting votes.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump, who has falsely insisted since he was first elected in 2016 that U.S. elections are riddled with fraud, from claiming noncitizens are voting for his opponents in droves.
Sources also generally described two separate but related threats around the SAVE changes: that the attempted overhaul of the database as a tool to track voter citizenship would lead to “shoddy data gathering,” as Singh put it, and that the data being collected and synthesized will be used by the Trump administration to buttress political attacks alleging that massive numbers of legal and eligible U.S. voters lack proof of citizenship.
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Safety, called the Trump administration’s overhaul of SAVE “rushed” and “deeply concerning.”
“I am alarmed by the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) access to its data and its attempt to market the database as a citizenship registry, despite the incomplete information it provides for verifying voter eligibility,” Padilla told CyberScoop in a statement. “I am committed to holding this Administration accountable and will continue to demand answers from USCIS in order to protect Americans’ data and access to the ballot box.”
Padilla is among the committee members who must vote on whether to confirm Joseph Edlow, USCIS’s acting leader, as director of the agency. In written questions, Padilla asked Edlow about DOGE’s access to SAVE, plans for using Social Security numbers and bulk searches, and whether the agency has tested the database’s accuracy — especially regarding the risk of misidentifying eligible voters as noncitizens. He also asked whether USCIS will notify individuals before states remove them from voter databases based on SAVE data.
This data could be used by the administration to coerce states into adopting Trump’s voter roll policies — through executive orders, federal lawsuits, and threats to withhold election grant funding by alleging noncompliance with HAVA.
Threats, legal challenges abound
The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against North Carolina alleging noncompliance with HAVA around proof of citizenship. The Brennan Center has joined with North Carolina voters, as well as the League of Women’s Voters, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and Forward Justice in an attempt to intervene in the DOJ’s lawsuit.
In their motion, the groups cast the suit as another link in a chain of failed attempts by Republicans to subject North Carolina voters to “a seemingly endless loop of scrutiny, despite doing everything they can to confirm that they were (or currently are) properly registered.”
In addition to the DOJ’s lawsuit against North Carolina, over the past two months it has also issued a statement of interest in support of an ongoing lawsuit alleging violations of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) against Oregon’s state government, and sent a letter to the Wisconsin Board of Elections warning that it was in violation of HAVA and would have future funding pulled if the body failed to comply.
Multiple experts and election officials told CyberScoop the core complaints in some of these cases are so minor that they can’t fathom why the federal government was filing a lawsuit over them.
For example, the North Carolina lawsuit alleges that state election officials violated HAVA by failing “to maintain accurate lists” of eligible voters in its statewide voter database. The government’s primary evidence for this claim was that North Carolina’s voter registration form used red ink — which signified the information was voluntary — on the section asking voters for their driver’s license number and last four digits of their Social Security number.
Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of North Carolina’s Board of Elections from 2019 until May, told CyberScoop the issue was quickly fixed and the color of the ink was changed for new forms. Nevertheless, it was enough for DOJ to claim that “there currently are a significant number of voters that do not have a driver’s license number, last four digits of a social security number, or any other identifying number, as required by Section 303 of HAVA, listed in North Carolina’s state voter registration file.”
Meanwhile, the Oregon lawsuit questions whether state governments can delegate voter roll maintenance to localities or if the NVRA requires states to manage it themselves. Since many states rely on localities for their voter registration verification, a ruling against Oregon could place extra legal and administrative burden on other states.
It could also feed political attacks from the Trump administration that states aren’t doing enough to root out noncitizen voters, even as all other available evidence points to noncitizen voting being extremely rare and that perpetrators are easily caught.
State officials contacted by CyberScoop gave varying reactions to the announced changes, with some embracing them, some expressing opposition or concerns and others citing the need for more information.
Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger conducted his own state audit of noncitizen voters leading up to the 2024 election, which found 20 noncitizens registered to vote out of an eligible 8.2 million state voters — none of whom had attempted to cast a ballot in the upcoming elections. Notably, a check of state voter rolls against SAVE in 2022 identified a much higher number (1,634) of non-verified voters, something that resulted in the temporary suspension of their ability to vote in elections.
“I’m proud to see DHS implementing the exact improvements we called for,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “This new bulk verification tool will make it easier to keep our voter rolls clean, while still protecting every eligible voter’s rights.”
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson claimed this month that SAVE helped her office find the names of 33 “potential noncitizens” who voted in last year’s general election, and called the system a “game-changer.” The Texas Attorney General’s Office later confirmed the identification of those voters and referrals leading to criminal investigations were established through the state’s use of SAVE.
A spokesperson for Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said his office hasn’t used SAVE because the state’s data-sharing laws don’t allow it. His office is allowed to share sensitive data, like residents’ dates of birth and Social Security numbers, only with specific agencies for specific purposes, and USCIS isn’t on the list.
In New Hampshire, the legislature passed a law last year requiring all first-time voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. The law is currently being challenged in a lawsuit by three U.S. citizens who were born in New Hampshire but weren’t old enough to vote in 2024, claiming the law places an undue burden on them as eligible voters. Scanlon, the New Hampshire secretary of state, argued the issue was as much about perception as it was about reality.
But Brinson Bell said that while it’s not unheard of for states to tap databases like SAVE during investigations into voter fraud, it’s rare because the system doesn’t do a great job of tracking either the U.S. immigrant population or current immigration status.
“What we know is that this database is not a nationwide, universal database for all U.S. citizens or noncitizens. It’s only there for those who were noncitizens seeking work … who may be in the database,” Brinson Bell said. “And then the update of that [database] as someone’s status changes is not necessarily instantaneous. It’s not even necessarily required.”
David Levine, an election integrity consultant and senior fellow at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, said SAVE is not a comprehensive database of U.S. citizenship, noting “there is no single list of U.S. citizens anywhere.”
Levine said that previous iterations of SAVE could be clunky and sometimes difficult to use, and previous agreements between USCIS and states included language specifying that the information in SAVE is not sufficient to verify citizenship.
“A newly expanded database that could serve as a single, reliable source for verifying immigration status and U.S. citizenship nationwide would be huge, presuming that its quality and operability are top notch,” Levine said. “However, if the recent overhaul of the SAVE database was conducted in a suboptimal manner, that could lead to errors that adversely affect eligible voters’ access to the ballot and/or undermine confidence in the voting process, more broadly.”
Doris Meissner, who was former President Bill Clinton’s pick to head the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, said she remembers SAVE being widely used by states, but not for checking voter rolls. Repurposing the system should require plenty of testing, she said.
“I think I would probably encourage that there be a pilot and do some random sampling in a couple jurisdictions and see what information comes back, and look at that same information to see whether those sources of validating voter rolls without it would have yielded similar or nonsimilar results,” she said.
The Institute for Responsive Government is also recommending states proceed carefully, including by running tests that query the system using fabricated noncitizen records to see how it responds.
Kim Wyman, Washington state’s former secretary of state, said that while she believes SAVE will be helpful, “it’s not the end-all-be-all” and that state election officials must rely on a host of verification measures for a task as sensitive as removing someone’s ability to cast a vote. Relying on several data sources will be especially important, she said, because SAVE won’t immediately reflect recently naturalized citizens who’ve registered to vote.
“It’s not a list of U.S. citizens,” she said. “So it is a singular data point that may help election officials determine whether someone is eligible. But [then] that paperwork, from the moment they become a naturalized citizen to the moment that they’re taken off the SAVE database, might be days, might be hours, it might be months.”
If placing additional information in the honest and careful hands of state election officials is a boon, many interviewed for this article expressed concern over the ease with which such a gift could be perverted. Kabbas Azhar, an Equal Justice Works fellow with the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the Trump administration’s willingness to violate personal privacy by consolidating the personal information of Americans, along with its track record of flouting due process, should illustrate why SAVE “has grave implications.”
“It will be no surprise when a citizen’s right to vote is inevitably undermined by mistakes in the system,” Azhar wrote in an email. “There is no accountability, no explicit method outlined for how citizens can contest adverse decisions.”
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