Election deniers in Trump admin pushing ‘more powerful tool’ to probe voter rolls, report finds

A new report reveals that Trump administration officials are actively working to deploy a “more powerful tool” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to search voter rolls for noncitizens.

According to a ProPublica investigation published Monday, a group of political appointees within DHS has been working to expand the government’s ability not just to flag potential noncitizens on voter rolls, but to pursue criminal cases using Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the agency’s law enforcement arm.

The small group of DHS political appointees — referred to internally as “Team America” — includes officials with deep ties to the election denial movement. According to the report, these officials have been coordinating across agencies, building data-sharing systems and pushing to integrate voter data into federal enforcement pipelines.

The system they are building remains largely opaque and the “more powerful tool”  referenced in the report — how it would operate or what safeguards would apply — has not been publicly identified.

“More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them,” the report reads. 

The effort builds on a broader campaign by the Trump administration to collect voter data from states nationwide and run it through federal systems. Over the past year, the Department of Justice has demanded unredacted voter rolls — including sensitive personal information — from nearly all states, suing any that refused. 

DOJ has admitted that the data it’s received from states has been shared with DHS for citizenship checks.

At the center of those checks has been the SAVE system, a federal database originally designed to verify immigration status for public benefits, not voter eligibility. The Trump administration agreed to greatly expand SAVE’s capabilities last year to scan state voter rolls for potential noncitizens.

Even so, SAVE maintains significant limitations — and documented flaws.

It can only flag potential matches based on incomplete or outdated records, and it’s a strictly administrative tool with no enforcement authority. 

State reviews of SAVE results have repeatedly found that only a small fraction of flagged individuals are actually ineligible to vote, with U.S. citizens — including naturalized citizens — sometimes misidentified due to data errors.

That context may help explain why Trump officials are now working to “harness” a more powerful tool.

Unlike SAVE, HSI has the authority to open criminal cases, issue subpoenas and coordinate prosecutions. The shift signals a move from administrative voter roll maintenance into federal law enforcement.

In at least one case, HSI has already been pulled into election-related probes, opening an investigation into Arizona’s 2020 election results earlier this year. The probe — launched years after the election and despite repeated findings of no fraud — reflects how federal law enforcement is being drawn into efforts long driven by election denial claims.

At the same time, the data pipeline feeding those investigations is expanding.

At least 17 states have turned over full voter files to the Trump administration, while nearly 30 face ongoing legal pressure to comply. DOJ officials have indicated the data is being used to analyze voter eligibility — and potentially to direct states to remove voters identified by federal review.

DOJ officials have also claimed to have referred some findings for criminal prosecutions.