New Yorkers wait to cast their votes on November 2, 2025.Stephanie Keith/Getty
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This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.
President Donald Trump and the election conspiracy theorists he surrounds himself with are determined to exclude people from voting in the 2026 election based on one database: the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.
Why?
SAVE is an incomplete and flawed database that has been shown to produce a massive number of false positives, incorrectly identifying American citizens as aliens. Thus, using SAVE to exclude voters buttresses the lie that a significant number of undocumented immigrants vote in elections.
Trump’s latest effort came last week when he signed an executive order directing DHS to use SAVE and other databases to create, for each state, “a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” Trump’s executive order then directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute “individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots” to anyone not on the list.
The order, in effect, confirms that the administration aims to exclude purportedly ineligible voters by creating a national voter registration list. It is an effort to coerce states to use the SAVE database to purge voters or risk criminal charges. But SAVE, as its full name suggests, was designed to determine eligibility for government benefits—not citizenship. And, crucially, as NPR noted, “Not all of the data is necessarily up to date.”
Shortly after Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search the database for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.
Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.
In Missouri, for example, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. For St. Louis County, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. But the county immediately determined that 35 percent of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133—meaning at least 81 percent of SAVE’s noncitizen results were incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and have 90 days to appeal.
Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be US citizens—our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”
Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, SAVE identified 84 supposed noncitizens registered to vote. Twelve responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, even though county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.
“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”
Trump’s executive order also attempts to weaponize the US Postal Service (USPS), prohibiting it from mailing ballots to anyone who does not appear on the new federal voter list.
Trump’s executive order, which would inject chaos into the voting process months before the election, is already being challenged in multiple court cases. These challenges have a good chance of success because the Constitution is very clear that states, not the federal government, have the primary authority to administer elections. Congress can pass laws that impact election administration, but Trump is attempting to invalidate state laws and procedures by executive fiat.
Trump’s efforts to enlist the USPS are also legally dubious, because it is an independent agency legally obligated to deliver mail throughout the country in a neutral manner. Trump’s order would transform it into an arbiter of voter eligibility.
But even if his executive order is blocked by the courts, the push to purge voters from the rolls before November—or challenge ballots after the votes are in—remains a threat.
Trump’s executive order is trying to force states to cross-reference their voting list with the SAVE database. But in November 2025, even before the executive order was issued, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that 26 states “already have, or are in the process of establishing, a memorandum of agreement for voter verification with SAVE.”
The USCIS website specifically lists 24 states that have formally registered to use SAVE: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. It’s possible that more will join before the election.
When asked whether the DOJ could ask DHS to scour state voter rolls for noncitizens, Voting Section chief Eric Neff said, “Yes, and we intend to do so.”
According to the DHS, SAVE has labeled 21,000 registered voters submitted by states as noncitizens. Whatever happens with the executive order, the purging of voters based on SAVE data in these states will continue. It’s unclear what, if anything, each state will do to verify the list of supposed noncitizens produced by SAVE.
Separately, the DOJ has requested detailed voter roll data from at least 48 states. The states were presented with a memorandum of understanding from the DOJ requiring them to remove any voters the federal government deemed ineligible using SAVE and potentially other databases. In December, the acting head of the DOJ Voting Section, Eric Neff, said 11 states were willing to comply with the MOU.
According to a tracker maintained by the Brennan Center, 12 states have provided (or committed to provide) a full list of registered voters, including drivers license numbers and other personal information, to the DOJ. (Several other states have provided publicly available voter data.)
The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to force them to turn over detailed voter registration. Courts have dismissed cases against California, Oregon, Georgia, and Michigan. But the DOJ has subsequently appealed or refiled in those states. The rest of the cases are still pending.
If the DOJ is ultimately successful in some or all of those cases, it could use the data to pressure states to purge their rolls of voters SAVE identified as noncitizens—just as the executive order contemplates. It could also use SAVE’s list of alleged noncitizens to challenge the results of close elections.
The Trump administration has claimed that it is requesting states’ voter data to check for compliance with federal laws requiring states to maintain clean voter registration lists, including the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act.
At the end of March, however, CBS News reported that the DOJ and the DHS “are close to finalizing an agreement that will allow the federal government to use sensitive voter registration data for immigration and criminal investigations.”
According to CBS, under the agreement, the DOJ would share state voter registration data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to check whether noncitizens have voted or are registered. Sources told CBS that the White House was also involved in discussions about the agreement.
The DOJ’s agreement with DHS appears to contradict statements made in court by its lawyers. On March 3, during a hearing in Minnesota, the court asked DOJ attorney James Tucker if the voter data was being used for immigration enforcement. “Not to my knowledge,” Tucker said.
On March 19, a federal judge in Connecticut asked Tucker if the DOJ would guarantee that voter data would not be given to DHS. “I simply cannot state what the Attorney General’s purpose may be at some other time,” Tucker replied. “What I can say is, as of today, there has been no directive or instruction that the data, the non-publicly available data, is going to be transmitted to any other agency.” He went on to say, “Under the circumstances it’s not consistent with what the United States has specifically stated in its basis and purpose.”
But after CBS News asked the DOJ for comment on the agreement, a DOJ attorney acknowledged its true plans to the court. When asked by a Rhode Island judge whether the DOJ could ask DHS to check for noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, Neff said, “Yes, and we intend to do so,” the Rhode Island Current reported.
The timeline raises serious ethical questions about whether DOJ attorneys knew about the deal with DHS and have intentionally misled the court, which would violate American Bar Association rules. While CBS News “could not determine whether all of the lawyers…arguing the cases in court” knew of the plan, sources said that “at least a handful of senior attorneys from the Civil Rights Division have been privy to some discussions about the data-sharing plan…in addition to multiple officials in other Justice Department offices, including the deputy attorney general.”
