The Justice Department has sued 29 states to obtain their voter registration files. It is using a federal immigration database to identify suspected noncitizens on those rolls. In state after state, the database keeps flagging eligible American citizens.
Courts have ruled against the Trump administration in every voter roll case where a judge has issued a ruling. The DOJ is still pushing.
The Tool
The database at the center of the campaign is called SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. It was designed to help government agencies verify immigration status for benefits eligibility. It was not designed to verify voter eligibility, and experts have repeatedly noted it is prone to producing false positives when used that way.
The core problem is outdated data. When someone immigrates to the United States and later becomes a naturalized citizen, that update does not always make it into the federal database quickly or accurately. A person who has been a citizen for years may still appear in SAVE as a noncitizen. States that run their voter rolls against that database can end up flagging thousands of eligible voters as suspected noncitizens.
Idaho ran that exact comparison. The state initially identified 760 potential noncitizens out of 1.1 million registered voters. After further investigation, roughly three dozen were referred to law enforcement. That is a false positive rate of more than 95 percent.
What the DOJ Is Asking States to Do
The Justice Department has not just been requesting data. It has been proposing agreements under which states would be required to investigate voters flagged by the system and remove them from the rolls within 45 days. That timeline gave election officials significant concern.
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, handed over voter data but refused to sign the agreement. He said the vast majority of voters flagged in his state turned out to be citizens after further review. The 45-day removal requirement, with no adequate time for voters to appeal or correct errors, was a line he would not cross.
Watson is not alone. CNN reported in February that Republican election officials across multiple states have pushed back against the DOJ’s voter roll campaign, concerned that the aggressive timeline and unreliable data would result in eligible voters being stripped from the rolls before they could do anything about it.
The 90-Day Problem
Federal law already restricts what states can do to voter rolls in the months before an election. The National Voter Registration Act bars systematic removal programs within 90 days of a federal election. That window is designed to protect voters who might be wrongly removed from having enough time to correct the error before Election Day.
With November approaching, CNN reported Monday that the Trump administration is now actively testing the scope of that 90-day restriction, pushing for removals that would fall inside or near that protected window. The administration’s position is that its purge program does not qualify as a “systematic” removal and therefore does not trigger the quiet period protection.
Legal experts and voting rights advocates disagree. Several cases challenging that interpretation are currently working their way through the courts.
The Scorecard in Court
In every case where a judge has issued a ruling on the DOJ’s voter roll demands, the DOJ has lost. Courts have rejected the administration’s legal arguments for obtaining the data on the merits, and in some cases thrown out the lawsuits on procedural grounds entirely.
A Trump-appointed judge dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit seeking Michigan’s voter roll data. Other courts have ruled similarly. The administration has appealed and continued filing new cases.
The Bigger Picture
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal. It is also extraordinarily rare. Federal prosecutors and election officials have found no evidence it occurs at any meaningful scale. The DOJ’s own data requests, when states have complied, have produced results consistent with that finding: thousands of flags, almost no actual noncitizen voters.
What the purge campaign does produce is a different outcome. Eligible voters, most of them naturalized citizens, are flagged, investigated, and in some cases removed from rolls they have every legal right to be on. In a midterm election where the House majority could turn on a handful of districts, the voters who get removed matter.
Trump has said publicly that changes to redistricting and voting rules could net Republicans 100 more seats and end what he called the “crooked game of politics.” The voter roll purge campaign is part of the same strategy. Courts keep stopping it. The administration keeps filing.