Topeka, Kan.– Even as Democratic officials Fight this effort in courtthe Trump administration ran millions of voter registrations through government databases to determine their eligibility in a process that critics fear could end up purging eligible voters from the rolls before the November election.
At least 67 million registrations, most of them from Republican-controlled states, have been subject to an enhanced verification program at the US Department of Homeland Security, and tens of thousands of them have been classified as potential non-citizens or dead persons. Some states allow just one month for people to prove eligibility and others suspend it immediately.
The nationwide sweep of state voter rolls is part of a broader effort by Republican President Donald Trump to federalize certain election functions and Promote your messages Although the elections were marred by non-citizen voting Cases of this are rare. Voting rights and civil rights advocates say the DHS system is error-prone and could mistakenly flag who is eligible to vote.
“If a voter is wrongly removed, by the time they know and correct it, they may miss the opportunity to vote in that election,” said Frieda Levinson, an attorney with the ACLU of Ohio. The group is challenging an Ohio law that requires monthly checks with the DHS system.
Voters like 29-year-old Anthony Neal were caught in the middle.
The South African, who became a citizen more than a decade ago, was classified as a potential non-citizen when the state of Texas checked her voter file through the Department of Homeland Security’s verification system. Neal’s local elections office in Denton, north of Dallas, temporarily canceled his registration last fall while he waited for a new passport to replace an expired one.
He said in one of the interviews: “I told him: You should know that I am a citizen, and that the passport is there.”
Trump was trying to do that Reforming US electionsincluding invitation Federal list of verified votersand his Department of Justice paid the states Submit unredacted voter information To conduct mass screenings through the DHS program known as SAVE.
The Ministry of Justice has prosecuting states Who refuse, saying the government is trying to make sure they comply with federal law and have accurate voter rolls. States are already taking Number of steps To maintain the accuracy of voter lists.
SAVE, an acronym for Systematic Alien Verification of Entitlements, was created under immigration law that requires DHS to help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from reaching noncitizens. More than 1,300 agencies use it, said US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
At least 25 states have used the SAVE system to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration dramatically expanded search capabilities, and 60 million registrations were scanned within a year, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services. This number does not include an additional 7.4 million registrations from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state Board of Electionswhich was 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’ confidence 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 to keep voter rolls clean.
Schwab’s endorsement is notable because it used to be so Openly skeptical That non-citizens pose a significant threat of voter fraud.
Citizenship and Immigration Services said voter registration checks conducted on 60 million identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens. Those checks also identified about 350,000 people who appeared to be dead, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said during a recent Fox News interview.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections said its examination identified another 34,000 registered voters who were potentially deceased.
Even if all of them are ultimately found to be ineligible, they will represent small percentages of total registered voters. The number for non-citizens will be approximately 400 per million registrations. About 384,000 people were identified as potentially deceased in about 67 million registrations which is a small fraction of 1%.
Some voters have been mistakenly flagged.
In Dallas, election officials recently revoked the registration of Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old lawyer and voting rights activist, without providing an explanation. He has been voting regularly for 50 years, most recently in the state’s March 3 primary, and officials suspect he died.
“I shouldn’t have been on any list,” he said.
Voting rights advocates have filed at least six federal lawsuits over SAVE checks, either against the Trump administration or states that use the program.
Neal, the 29-year-old college administrator, is one of the plaintiffs in one such case, recently filed in the District of Columbia against the Department of Justice. The lawsuit alleges an “unlawful and unprecedented pursuit” by the administration to obtain “confidential data of millions of Americans.”
Lawyers also argue that eligible voters will be disenfranchised because of outdated or incomplete data.
Neil came to the United States from South Africa with his parents when he was eight years old. His parents became citizens when he was sixteen, making him a citizen as well. He said he has voted regularly since he was 18 years old.
However, he received a letter in October in a white envelope that looked like junk mail. She told him he had been identified as a potential noncitizen by SAVE’s examination of Texas’ 18 million voter registrations. He had 30 days to prove otherwise, a deadline he missed because of the time it took to obtain a new passport.
“It’s clear that the process they put in place for this is not working,” he said.
Republican officials said the administration does not portray SAVE searches as foolproof. Instead, it identifies recordings that should be investigated further, they said.
In Kansas, Schwab’s office is still investigating a list of flagged registrations and has not yet disclosed how many ineligible voters made a SAVE check of the state’s 2 million registrations.
Once his office sends flagged names to county officials, a state law enacted this year requires them to list filings as “pending” or “suspended” until the cases are resolved. The flagged person can still vote, but the ballot is set aside for further review and may not be counted.
Texas is supposed to give people with premium registrations 30 days to prove they are properly registered. North Carolina will require county boards of elections to give people whose registrations have been challenged a hearing before they can be overturned.
A new Ohio law requires local boards of elections to “immediately” cancel the registrations of people the Secretary of State determines are noncitizens during registration checks that the official must conduct at least monthly.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an email that people’s voting rights are not in jeopardy because “all they have to do to immediately regain their registration status is provide proof of citizenship.”
But Levinson, the ACLU attorney, described the approach differently.
“Shoot first and ask questions later,” she said.
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Associated Press writers Jack Dora in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Gary Robertson, in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.