Moved recently? Under Trump’s voter eligibility lists, you could be disenfranchised

Every year, millions of Americans move to a different state, seeking new opportunities, economic advancement or just the chance to be closer to family. That mobility arguably defines the nation’s character.

But if President Donald Trump has his way and creates state-by-state lists of people eligible to vote in federal elections, those millions of recent movers could face disenfranchisement right before the midterms.

In his March 2026 anti-voting order, Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use vast troves of Americans’ personal data to identify all eligible voters ahead of the upcoming midterms — part of the president’s broader attack on elections. 

But there’s one key problem in Trump’s directive: “Put simply: people move,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) noted in a recent court briefing in its lawsuit challenging the creation of the lists.

The federal government simply does not collect real-time data on where people live that would be required to accurately assemble the lists Trump demanded. But that hasn’t stopped DHS from moving forward with the lists. In fact, no court order currently bars the department from doing so. 

The Trump administration has so far refused to say whether it intends to release the lists, as well as an accompanying online portal through which states will access the lists, before the upcoming midterms.

EPIC has warned that the lists could imperil millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights. Last month, it asked U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis to declare the lists unlawful, and she could issue a ruling at any moment.

In a briefing late last week, the privacy nonprofit argued that the lists, beyond being unlawful, are largely not feasible because the federal government simply doesn’t have reliable state residency information.

“No such comprehensive database exists anywhere at the federal level,” EPIC said.

No clear directions and bad data

If the Trump administration publishes the lists based on what residency information federal agencies do have, a significant number of voters could be incorrectly marked as living in a state where they no longer reside. Or they might not be included on a list at all, which could threaten their right to vote entirely.

And the federal government also hasn’t issued adequate instructions for how to use the lists.

Trump’s executive order did not provide states with any guidance on what, if anything, election officials should do with them. A June memo from DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services detailing its implementation of the president’s directive also offered little clarification.

That means it will largely be up to the states to decide. Republican-led states could treat the lists as authoritative and use them to remove voters from their state rolls. But the lists would likely contain widespread inaccuracies due to incorrect or incomplete information in federal databases.

The result? Eligible voters could be removed from state rolls just weeks before the elections.

“Given the inaccuracy of the federal government’s state residency data, the risk that an adult citizen does not end up on the correct list—i.e., the list to which the election officials in that person’s state of residence has access, affirming their current residency in that state—is substantial,” EPIC wrote.

This is where recent movers would be particularly vulnerable. 

Though moving rates are at a historic low, plenty of people are still seeking greener pastures elsewhere. In 2024, an estimated 7.1 million people moved states — roughly 2.1% of the country’s population that year. Not all of those people were eligible voters, but millions likely were. 

The federal government is not capable of keeping track of all those people’s current addresses.

The Internal Revenue Service knows where many people live based on annual tax returns. The Social Security Administration has people’s addresses for benefits enrollment. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs collect that information for similar purposes. And the U.S. Postal Service, which Trump directed to restrict mail voting in the same executive order, also temporarily keeps people’s addresses on file as part of its change-of-address program.

But that doesn’t mean they will always have up-to-date information if a person recently moved.

Moreover, under the Privacy Act of 1974, they can’t just share that data across the government. 

Vital to EPIC’s lawsuit, the Privacy Act bars federal agencies from sharing Americans’ personal information with other governmental entities without providing advance notice to the public.

So far, none of those agencies have submitted a formal public notice — what’s known as a System of Records Notice — that they intend to share residential data with DHS for the creation of Trump’s voter lists.

EPIC has also alleged that DHS is not authorized to create the lists under  8 U.S. Code § 1373, the law the Department of Justice (DOJ) has used in its defense of the lists. It prohibits all governments in the U.S. from restricting the sharing of immigration information with federal authorities. In turn, it also requires DHS to respond to governmental inquiries about an individual’s citizenship or immigration status.

Notably, state residency information is entirely unrelated to citizenship or immigration status. However, per Trump’s directive, DHS still intends to collect and transmit millions of Americans’ residency data to states, which presumably have better residential information than the federal government to begin with.

Moving doesn’t forfeit voting rights

People who move also don’t give up their right to vote. It sounds like an obvious statement, but Congress was actually so worried that state residency laws could disenfranchise people that, in 1970, it mandated that no state can impose a residency requirement of longer than 30 days before Election Day.

But Trump ordered DHS to transmit the voter lists to state election officials “no fewer than 60 days before each regularly scheduled Federal election.” 

The time discrepancy between when DHS is required to transmit the list and the 30-day residency requirement means that, if a person moves after a list has been sent, they could show up on the list of the state they moved from, even if they registered in their new state. And the number of errors in Trump’s lists from this difference could be extraordinarily high.

Crucially, millions of college students relocate states just weeks before elections for the start of the fall semester. Many of those students vote in their home state with absentee ballots, but many others vote in the states in which they attend college.

Trump’s order and DHS’s memo claimed that individual voters would have the chance to update information in their entries. But as with every other aspect of the voter lists plan, it’s unclear how exactly that would work in practice.