CAUSE FOR ALARM: Why the Federal Government's Meddling in State Voter Rolls Should Alarm You

The federal government is meddling with voter lists again, and it has become significantly more sophisticated with its playbook strategies to attack our elections and silence voters.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it would expand its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to create a system designed for state and local election officials to verify U.S. citizens’ voter eligibility on state voter rolls. As DHS put it, “to prevent noncitizens from . . . voting illegally.”

Let’s start here: The SAVE system was not designed for tracking U.S. citizenship or verifying voter eligibility. It’s a federal query system initially designed to help verify the citizenship and immigration status of individuals who are applying for public benefits. Yet, states like Ohio, Florida, and Georgia are already using or considering using SAVE to research swaths of voter lists for voter verification and/or list maintenance with less data input on individuals.

Problematic changes to the system include mixing federal data, such as Social Security numbers, requiring less individual information about a voter to create accurate matches, and bulk uploads of potentially hundreds of thousands of voters. This retooling effectively supercharges an otherwise flawed system. Here are five things you should know about the impact of the changes and retooling of the SAVE system: 

The administration’s claims that its rapidly developing new system will enable election officials to identify noncitizens on voter rolls are more complicated. Digging into the details triggers significant concerns about Americans’ privacy, booting completely eligible voters off the rolls, and disinformation about our elections. 

Election officials deserve proper tools to help them conduct list maintenance without putting their most vulnerable communities at risk.  This is not that.

Use outside of its intended purpose—especially for voter eligibility verification—poses several serious problems. U.S. citizens have never been in this system. The system also doesn’t track comprehensive or real-time records of changes in citizenship status, which means naturalized citizens are often incorrectly flagged, potentially leading to erroneous voter purges. SAVE’s data is often outdated or inaccurate, which can also lead to legally eligible voters being wrongly flagged.

DHS will tell us that changes and nuances of this system are highly technical, for sure–  federal misuse of data sources, data quality issues, bulk case submission, duplicate case responses, and privacy breaches– but there’s more. The SAVE system is not transparent, so those wrongly flagged do not have a straightforward process to correct errors or challenge findings. SAVE focuses on immigrants and those who’ve had any interaction with immigration services, so using it for voter verification could disproportionately target naturalized citizens and communities of color, which can lead to undue burdens.

Mixing government data has a long history of producing bad results and leading to the disenfranchisement of U.S. citizens. In Arizona, approximately 218,000 long-time registered voters were identified as having to provide documentary proof of citizenship through the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) just last fall. 

We have to sound the alarm about the impacts on voters and what’s coming down the pike, particularly for Black, Brown, Native American, and other historically excluded communities: systematic and erroneous removals of voters from the rolls, mass voter challenges, and the dangerous consequences of anti-voter policies rooted in misinformation.

President Donald Trump most recently threatened to issue an executive order to end vote-by-mail and eliminate voting machines. He also issued a March executive order calling for a sweeping overhaul of federal elections. State officials from Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin are now fielding requests from DOJ for election data, access to their voter rolls, and information about their voting machines. The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Administration held a hearing on voter roll list maintenance. The DOJ is exploring ways to criminalize state and county election officials for failing to follow security standards for election systems. The DOJ also plans to contact all 50 states regarding their compliance with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Federal government actions taken now are setting the stage for 2026, 2028, and beyond.

As we get closer to the 2026 midterms, we will have to lean into our work with state and local election officials and partners to prevent partisan interference in elections and advance fair, inclusive voter registration practices, and remove barriers that make it more difficult for people to cast their ballots. 

By leaning in, we can help provide election officials with the resources they need to prevent the misuse of data that undermines democracy and erodes trust in the electoral process.