Trump Administration Runs 67 Million Voter Registrations Through DHS Verification
The Trump administration has run at least 67 million voter registrations through a beefed-up DHS verification program, with tens of thousands flagged as potential noncitizens.
Objective Facts
Even as Democratic officials fight the effort in court, the Trump administration has run at least 67 million voter registrations through government databases, with tens of thousands flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died. 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, and more than 1,300 agencies use it. Voting and civil rights advocates say the DHS system is error-prone and can mistakenly flag people who are eligible to vote. Even if all flagged registrations were verified as ineligible, noncitizens would represent about 400 for every 1 million registrations, and some 384,000 people identified as potentially deceased in about 67 million registrations is a fraction of 1%. DHS has lowered the SAVE system's target accuracy rate from 99% to 97%, and given the Trump administration's expansion of SAVE, there are an awful lot of names that were wrongly flagged when the accuracy rate dipped from 99% to 98%.
Left-Leaning Perspective
Democrats including President Trump and his allies warn that the SAVE program could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the SAVE Act 'dead on arrival' and said 'The SAVE Act is nothing more than Jim Crow 2.0.' Schumer warned that if the legislation becomes law, online voter registration, registration by mail and registration drives would 'become a thing of the past' and the law would make it 'impossible' for Americans who don't have access to birth certificates or passports to vote. Nearly 30 Democratic senators warned the Trump administration that reports have already confirmed that eligible Americans are being targeted for removal from voter rolls after being erroneously flagged as non-citizens by the SAVE program, due in part to erroneous data shared by Social Security Administration. Campaign Legal Center, in an amicus brief, noted that newly incorporated SSA data is notoriously unreliable and SSA is not entrusted with making citizenship determinations or formally tracking citizenship status. Democracy Docket reported that the Department of Homeland Security has agreed to redesign its federal immigration database to serve voter 'verification' purposes in a dramatic expansion that voting rights advocates warned could supercharge wrongful purges and threaten voter privacy, with consequences likely to land hardest on minority voters, naturalized citizens and married women who changed their names, representing a seismic shift in election administration moving the country closer toward a centralized voter information system.
Right-Leaning Perspective
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it is 'committed to helping eliminate voter fraud' to restore Americans' trust in their elections, and Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, recently told a U.S. House committee that 'SAVE is one of the most important tool states have to verify voter information.' According to data from the Trump administration, the 60 million voter registration checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens, and U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said during a Fox News interview that those checks also identified about 350,000 people who appear to have died. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose defended Ohio's cooperation, saying they 'were happy to show our work to DOJ' and emphasizing that 'federal law is very clear that the US attorney general has the right to look at voter rolls to make sure that states are following the law.' Republican officials countered that the administration does not portray SAVE searches as foolproof, but instead identifies registrations that should be further investigated. The White House cited polling showing 84% support for voter ID, with 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents, and 67% of Democrats on board. Republican officials said the administration does not portray SAVE searches as foolproof but instead identifies registrations that should be further investigated. Republicans noted that in Kansas, flagged persons still can vote with ballots set aside for further review, Texas is supposed to give people with flagged registrations 30 days to prove they are properly registered, and North Carolina will require county elections boards to give people whose registrations are challenged a hearing before they can be canceled.
Deep Dive
The specific angle of this story is the practical implementation and risk of the Trump administration's SAVE verification expansion for flagging ineligible voters—not the broader election security debate, but the mechanics of how 67 million registrations are being checked against DHS databases and the consequences for valid voters. This is fundamentally about the tension between identifying ineligible voters and protecting eligible ones in a system that has demonstrably flagged naturalized citizens as noncitizens and that DHS itself has downgraded from 99% to 97% accuracy. The factual foundation shows: SAVE was originally designed for federal benefits eligibility verification, not citizenship determination for voting. The Trump administration expanded it in April 2025, and by May 2026, 60 million voter registrations had been checked in about a year, flagging roughly 24,000 as potential noncitizens and 384,000 as potentially deceased. However, in one reported case involving a state with 1 million voters, SAVE flagged 30 people as noncitizens, but when investigated, all but two were actually citizens and those two had never cast ballots. The system's accuracy rate has dropped from 99% to 98% according to DHS officials. Naturalized citizens like Anthony Nel (from South Africa, citizen for 10+ years) have been flagged and had registrations temporarily canceled. There's no dispute about these facts; what divides the perspectives is their significance and the system's readiness for mass deployment. The left's position correctly identifies that SAVE was not designed for this use, that accuracy rates are dropping, and that naturalized citizens are being harmed. However, their argument sometimes conflates the broader SAVE America Act legislative proposal with the administrative expansion of SAVE verification itself—they focus heavily on hypothetical problems (millions unable to get documents) without always grappling with the fact that some wrongful removal is already occurring. The right's position correctly notes that SAVE is designed to flag for investigation, not to be dispositive, and points to the relatively small percentages of flags compared to total registrations. However, they downplay the accuracy decline, the documented harms to valid voters like Nel, and the structural reality that citizens lack effective remedies once flagged close to election day—a 30-day window or requiring proof of citizenship are only solutions if citizens know they've been flagged, which some don't discover until they try to vote. What emerges: Both sides agree voter rolls should be accurate and that states have responsibilities to maintain them. Both acknowledge some procedural protections exist. But they diverge sharply on whether a system with declining accuracy, designed for benefits eligibility, should be running 67 million checks months before federal elections, and on what constitutes adequate protection for citizens wrongly flagged. Republicans emphasize the investigation-not-determination framing; Democrats emphasize that by the time errors are discovered, elections may have passed. The key unresolved question is whether the procedural safeguards in practice work—and the evidence of at least one successful challenge (Nel filed a lawsuit) and at least six lawsuits overall suggests the answer remains contested.