Trump administration promotes program to check voter eligibility.
Critics fear a midterm purge
[May 18, 2026]
By JOHN HANNA
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Even as Democratic officials fight the effort in
court, the Trump administration has run millions of 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 elections.
At least 67 million registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled
states, have gone through a beefed-up verification program at the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, 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.
The scanning of state voter rolls at the national level is part of a
broader effort by Republican President Donald Trump to federalize
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 Freda Levenson, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of
Ohio. The group is challenging an Ohio law requiring monthly checks with
the DHS system.
Voters such as 29-year-old Anthony Nel have been caught in the middle.
The native of South Africa, who became a citizen more than a decade ago,
was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter file
through the DHS verification system. Nel's local election office in
Denton, north of Dallas, temporarily canceled his registration last fall
while he was waiting for a new passport to replace an expired one.
“I’m like, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that the passport
exists,’” he said in an interview.
States' entire voter rolls reviewed
Trump has been trying to overhaul U.S. elections, including calling for
a federal list of verified voters, and his Department of Justice has
pushed states to hand over unredacted voter information for mass checks
through the DHS program known as SAVE.
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, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, 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. That figure does not
include an additional 7.4 million registrations from North Carolina,
where Republicans control the state election board, that were 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'
trust 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 states keep voter
rolls clean.
Schwab's endorsement is notable because he once was publicly skeptical
that noncitizens represented a significant voter fraud threat.
Republicans cite hits from SAVE searches
Citizenship and Immigration Services said the 60 million voter
registration checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens. U.S.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division, said during a recent Fox News
interview that those checks also identified about 350,000 people who
appear to have died.
North Carolina's State Board of Elections said its check had identified
another 34,000 registered voters who are potentially deceased.
Even if all those eventually were verified as ineligible, they would
represent small percentages of total registered voters. The figure for
noncitizens would be about 400 for every 1 million registrations. Some
384,000 people identified as potentially deceased in about 67 million
registrations is a fraction of 1%.
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Anthony Nel poses for The Associated Press on Thursday, April 30,
2026, in Denton, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Some voters have been mistakenly flagged.
In Dallas, election officials recently canceled the registration of
Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old lawyer and voting rights activist,
without explanation. He has been voting regularly for 50 years, most
recently in the state's March 3 primary, and suspects that officials
concluded he was deceased.
“I should not have been on any lists,” he said.
False positives are popping up
Voting rights advocates have filed at least six federal lawsuits
over SAVE checks, either against the Trump administration or states
using the program.
Nel, a 29-year-old college administrator, is a plaintiff in one of
them, filed recently in the District of Columbia against the Justice
Department. It alleges an “illegal and unprecedented quest” by the
administration for “millions of Americans’ confidential voter data.”
Lawyers also argue that eligible voters will be disenfranchised by
hits from outdated or incomplete data.
Nel came to the United States from South Africa with his parents at
age 8. His parents became citizens when he was 16, making him a
citizen, as well. He said he has voted regularly since he was 18.
Yet he received a letter in October in a white envelope that looked
to him like junk mail. It told him he had been identified as a
potential noncitizen through a SAVE check of Texas' 18 million voter
registrations. He had 30 days to prove otherwise — a deadline he
missed because of the time it took to get a new passport.
“It’s clear that this process that they’ve put into place for this
doesn’t work,” he said.
Defenders say the SAVE system is a first step
Republican officials said the administration does not portray SAVE
searches as foolproof. Instead, it identifies registrations that
should be further investigated, they said.
In Kansas, Schwab’s office is still investigating its list of
flagged registrations and has yet to disclose the number of hits of
potentially ineligible voters from a SAVE check of the state’s 2
million registrations.
Once his office forwards flagged names to county officials, a state
law enacted this year requires them to list the registrations as “in
suspense” or “pending” until the cases are resolved. A flagged
person still can vote, but the ballot is set aside for further
review and might not be counted.
Texas is supposed to give people with flagged registrations 30 days
to prove they are properly registered. North Carolina will require
county elections boards to give people whose registrations are
challenged a hearing before they can be canceled.
A new Ohio law requires local election boards to “promptly” cancel
the registrations of people whom the secretary of state identifies
as noncitizens during registration checks that the official is
required to make at least monthly.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an email
that people's voting rights are not in danger because "all they need
to do to immediately restore their registration status is show proof
of citizenship."
But Levenson, the ACLU lawyer, described the approach differently.
"Shoot first and ask questions later,” she said.
___
Associated Press writers Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, and
Gary Robertson, in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this
report.
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