Election chiefs say ‘desperate’ Trump DHS plan to blackmail states into purging voters ‘endangers American lives’

Secretaries of state are condemning the Trump administration’s latest reported attempt to exert control over elections by withholding homeland security funds from states unless they adopt draconian changes to their election procedures.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) told Democracy Docket the effort “endangers American lives and democracy itself.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is preparing to require states to overhaul how they run elections and maintain their voter registration lists as a condition to receive homeland security grants, CNN reported, citing multiple sources and internal documents it obtained. The grants are intended to help states prevent terrorism and prepare for natural disasters.

Under the new grant conditions, states would reportedly have to stop using certain election equipment and move to hand-marked paper ballots to receive the funding.

They would also have to run their full voter rolls through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), a DHS database that the Trump administration has attempted to retrofit into a massive tool to monitor voting. However, a federal court this week barred the database from being used to remove voters from registration rolls.

If states refuse the Trump administration’s demands, they would lose 20% of the security grants, which would equal tens of millions of dollars.

In a statement, Bellows denounced the new conditions, which have not yet been formally announced, as part of President Donald Trump’s broad campaign to undermine upcoming elections this November.

“Trump is trying to meddle in how states run American elections because he’s terrified of losing power after the 2026 midterms,” Bellows said. “Gutting Homeland Security funding to states that refuse to back down to the Trump Administration’s unconstitutional and illegal demands endangers American lives and democracy itself.”

“If these reports are true, this is yet another desperate, likely illegal attempt to seize control of our free, fair elections by a president who is afraid that the American people will hold him accountable,” Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said.

“The Constitution is clear: states run elections,” he added.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs (D) said that while his office has yet to see an official announcement of the grant changes, it is aware of DHS’s plans and is prepared to take action.

“As we have with previous federal attempts to interfere in the way we administer elections, we are prepared to take steps to oppose actions like these,” Hobbs said. “Conditioning funding when there are no federal laws to support those requirements is an unwarranted delay to receive federal support for preventing, protecting against, or responding to acts of terrorism and other threats.”

The Trump administration is pushing for greater control over elections in what it presents as a bid to combat voter fraud, which the president falsely claims is widespread.  

Without citing evidence, Trump has said for years that millions of noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. But numerous studies and state reviews, and even data from Trump’s Department of Justice, have repeatedly shown the opposite: that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare. 

Relying on the president’s false claims, the Trump administration has sought to pressure states into using the DHS’s overhauled SAVE system to find potential noncitizens or deceased people on their voter rolls.

Republican-led states that fed their rolls through the system claimed that it found thousands of potential noncitizens. But subsequent investigations revealed that the program routinely flagged naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote. 

In a sharply worded ruling Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the Trump administration from permitting states to query the database, finding that the project “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Alongside criticizing the SAVE program as fatally flawed, experts have also slammed it as an unlawful attempt to insert the executive branch into state voter list maintenance and ultimately, allow it to determine who can vote.

Trump has also asserted that ballot-marking devices (BMDs) are faulty and has pushed for paper ballots, which are already the norm in nearly every state. Around 30% of Americans live in jurisdictions that use BMDs — primarily those in Delaware, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Los Angeles County.

While voting security experts have criticized certain BMDs for lacking an auditable paper trail, they are crucial for thousands of voters with disabilities. Forcing states to replace their BMDs to access crucial security funding could also cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to an estimate by the Brennan Center for Justice and Verified Voting.

DHS has yet to distribute the new guidance to states officially. If it does, the Trump administration will likely face another round of lawsuits from state attorneys general. And there’s a decent chance that those suits will succeed in blocking the election-related conditions.

That’s because courts have already blocked similar attempts by the Trump administration to leverage DHS grants to force states to change their immigration laws or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Federal judges have consistently determined that Trump’s efforts to impose political conditions on DHS grants violated the separation of powers and U.S. administrative law. 

Judges could reach a similar conclusion about the reported election-related grant conditions, as under the Constitution, the president has no authority over federal election administration. That responsibility is solely given to the states, though Congress can “make or alter” state election regulations.