Trump administration’s programme to verify voter eligibility raises concerns

18 MAY 2026

The Donald Trump administration has run millions of U.S. 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 2026 election even as Democratic officials fight the effort in court.
At least 67 million registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled States, have gone through a beefed-up verification programme at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 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.
A flagged person still can vote, but the ballot is set aside for further review and might not be counted.
The scanning of State voter rolls at the national level is part of a broader effort by the Republican President to federalise 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 a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) program

Mr. Trump has been trying to overhaul U.S. elections, including calling for a federal list of verified voters.
The Department of Justice has pushed States to hand over unredacted voter information for mass checks through the DHS program known as SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements).
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 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.
Citizenship and Immigration Services said the 60 million voter registration checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens.
The checks also identified about 3,50,000 people who appear to have died.
Even if all those eventually were verified as ineligible, they would represent very small percentages of total registered voters.