Trump is building a national voter registry, threatening state control of elections

Since returning to office last year, President Donald Trump and the election deniers he’s placed in critical positions across the federal government have attacked voting on multiple fronts. Now, they’re targeting the most fundamental step for casting a ballot in U.S. elections: voter registration.

Using the Department of Justice (DOJ), the administration has demanded sensitive registration records from all states. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is running those records through opaque, flawed federal databases and pressuring states to remove thousands of voters flagged as potentially ineligible from their lists.

At the same time, the administration is creating a national registry of eligible voters that it may use to supplant state registration lists and disenfranchise qualified voters.

The Trump administration’s active attempt to exploit voter registration threatens to restrict Americans’ access to the ballot in all future elections, including the upcoming midterms. And in both its scope and overreach, its effort has been extraordinary. 

No other president in modern history has coordinated such an extensive campaign to undermine the foundational principle that the U.S. Constitution gives states — not the executive branch — primary authority to regulate elections, with congressional oversight as a backstop.

Central to that authority are states’ abilities to define voter qualifications and establish and maintain voter registration records. The Framers gave states and Congress shared authority over elections for an obvious reason: A single branch of government that could unilaterally manage elections would have a strong incentive to abuse that control to remain in power.

The risk is not hypothetical. Authoritarian leaders in countries with electoral systems more centralized than the U.S. have repeatedly leveraged their authority over national election machinery to weaken political opposition and consolidate power.

In targeting voter registration, Trump is attempting to do the same in the U.S.

DOJ voter roll crusade

The Trump administration’s first attack on voter registration targeted state voter lists — massive, decentralized repositories of Americans’ personal data.

Right now, somewhere between 204 and 211 million Americans are registered to vote — likely around three-fourths of the U.S. voting-age population. The exact figure is constantly fluctuating as new people register and others move or die and get removed from rolls.

To register, prospective voters give states their personal information, like their full names, birthdates, addresses, driver’s license numbers and, in some cases, Social Security numbers.

In the spring of 2025, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division began seeking that sensitive data when it demanded that almost all states give the federal government their complete, unredacted voter rolls. (It did not send a demand to North Dakota, which is the only state without voter registration.)

At least 18 Republican-led states complied in various ways. The DOJ then sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., after they refused to hand over their voters’ sensitive personal information. So far, 26 federal district courts and the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled against the department in those suits.

Initially, the precise motivations behind the Civil Rights Division’s requests were unclear. DOJ attorneys and officials generally said the department needed the data to ensure states comply with federal voting laws or to find noncitizens on rolls. But they were reluctant to disclose exactly how the department would use the data, even when federal judges pressed them for information.

Since then, court proceedings have revealed that the demands were part of an expansive initiative to subject hundreds of millions of Americans to federal inspection simply for registering to vote. Additionally, the Civil Rights Division sought to pressure states to remove or disenfranchise voters it deemed ineligible from rolls across the country.

The SAVE database

That plan went hand in hand with a separate Trump administration scheme that aimed to harness data to restrict voting: The DOJ intended to compare the unredacted state rolls against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, a DHS citizenship-status database plagued with inaccuracies.

SAVE has existed for decades as a tool to verify the immigration status of people applying for government benefits. But in his first anti-voting executive order last year, Trump directed DHS to transform the system so it could be used to maintain voter rolls. DHS did this by merging Social Security Administration (SSA) data — including the Social Security numbers of natural-born citizens — and other data from across the federal government into the system. The department also enabled it to process millions of verification inquiries at once.

As a result, SAVE became a massive, centralized — but deeply flawed — citizenship database that doubled as a mass voter eligibility checker. 

The U.S. has never had anything like that before. The Elections Clause empowers states — not the executive branch — to run elections. Meanwhile, longstanding privacy concerns and fears over government surveillance have made Americans and their politicians wary of such efforts to stockpile citizens’ personal data. 

Trump had no such compunctions. Following those upgrades, his administration started using the enhanced SAVE system to directly maintain state rolls. After the DOJ received millions of voter records from the complying states, it gave the data to DHS for verification through SAVE. Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ Civil Rights Division chief, claimed on Fox News in March that Homeland Security had sent around 60 million records through the system. She said it flagged tens of thousands of people as noncitizens.

“We’ve referred approximately twenty-five thousand people with no citizenship records to Homeland Security to dig into that further and see the extent to which people voted,” Dhillon said.

It’s unclear how many of those people were actually citizens, but many likely were. The SSA citizenship records the Trump administration incorporated into the system are incomplete and outdated, in large part because the agency didn’t start consistently maintaining citizenship information until 1981. 

Additionally, when conservative states used the modified SAVE system to check their rolls, they found it routinely erroneously flagged citizens — particularly naturalized citizens — as noncitizens. 

Texas was one of the first states to send its list through the augmented SAVE. Its secretary of state’s office said the system flagged “2,724 potential noncitizens” registered to vote. But county officials later confirmed that at least 578 were citizens, meaning SAVE had an error rate of at least 21%, or one in every five people it reviewed. 

A federal judge in D.C. last week found that the Civil Rights Division’s unilateral use of state voter data wasn’t just impermissible under federal law, but it also represented “the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote.”

“Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states,” U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote while vacating the Civil Rights Division voter roll initiative, which she added was “antithetical” to the division’s “purpose and history.”

But Sooknanan did not rule on use of the enhanced SAVE system to vet voter rolls. In a separate ruling earlier this year, she found the practice unlawful, but the Supreme Court stayed that order last month. 

The DOJ is expected to appeal her latest ruling. For now, it marks a major blow to one of Trump’s key mechanisms to control state voter lists. However, many of his other methods remain active and unblocked.

Reverse-engineering voter data

After running into legal roadblocks in its voter roll cases, the Trump administration appeared to begin re-creating states’ unredacted voter records using personal data it purchased from commercial databases like Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR and LexisNexis’ Accurint.

In September, a DHS whistleblower alleged that Homeland Security agents were integrating the third-party private personal data into public voter files and using it to access individuals’ voting records through state registration portals — effectively impersonating voters. 

In some instances, these searches may have violated state privacy laws that strictly limit who can access a person’s voter data. On Virginia’s registration portal, for example, a person must enter a voter’s date of birth and the last four digits of their Social Security number and click a box indicating that they either are the voter or have been authorized by them to access their voting records.

Jay Jones, Virginia’s attorney general, has said DHS would have broken state law if it accessed voters’ information without first obtaining permission. 

According to the whistleblower report, DHS specifically used Social Security numbers it obtained from Accurint to reconstruct private voter rolls from Connecticut, a state the DOJ sued after it refused to give up its unredacted roll.

This week, three civil rights groups asked a federal court to declare DHS’s use of state voter data unlawful under privacy laws.

Trump’s state citizenship lists

But Trump’s most dangerous attack so far on voter registration is likely his attempt to create federal lists of voters, state by state.

Currently, roughly 250 million Americans are eligible to vote under state laws. For numerous reasons, tens of millions of them are not registered to vote and do not participate in elections. But even if they don’t, Trump still wants to know who they are.

As part of his second anti-voting executive order earlier this year, Trump instructed DHS to use huge troves of federal data to compile state-specific lists of people eligible to cast ballots in future elections, potentially including in the upcoming midterms.

Trump’s demand was monumental. In effect, he ordered the executive branch to define the U.S. electorate, which for centuries has instead been determined by individual state governments and federal constitutional amendments. 

Combined, the lists could function as a national registry of voters.

Specifically, Trump’s order directed DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to work with the SSA to assemble, “no fewer than 60 days” before federal elections, a list of people in each state who:

1. are U.S. citizens; 
2. are “above the age of 18” at the time of the upcoming federal election; and
3. maintain a residence in the corresponding state.

To compile the lists, the order says USCIS and SSA should pull from citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security records, data from the SAVE system and “other relevant Federal databases.”

The order then directs DHS to transmit these “State Citizenship Lists” to state election chiefs. But it does not specify what — if anything — election officials should do with them. 

In practice, however, the Trump administration appears to intend the lists to function as the basis for state registration lists.

“We’re going to ensure that each state’s election officials are provided with a comprehensive view of who the eligible voters in their jurisdiction actually are, allowing them to properly verify that everybody voting in their elections is legally able to vote,” Will Scharf, Trump’s White House counsel, said before the president signed the order in the Oval Office this March.

Trump’s order was silent on the repercussions voters may face for not appearing on a list. And it stressed that inclusion “does not indicate that the individual has been properly registered to vote in the State.” But the administration also implied that it is a prerequisite to registering.

The federal lists could also enable the Trump administration, GOP-led states or anti-voting groups to challenge the registration and ballots of voters who do not appear on a list. That’s a serious threat: Because no federal agency collects real-time state residency data, a significant portion of the actual electorate may not show up on a list.

Moreover, several states allow underage people to vote in the primaries so long as they turn 18 before the general election. By limiting eligibility to 18 years of age, Trump’s lists may exclude those voters.

DHS has already taken several steps toward compiling the lists, even saying on a new webpage in September that they were “coming soon.” Though multiple lawsuits are challenging DHS over the lists, no court has currently blocked their creation. A federal judge in Maryland is set to rule on whether the lists violate federal privacy laws.

With less than three weeks until Election Day, the DOJ has refused to say whether the Trump administration plans to release them before November.

Any attempt to do that could be deeply destabilizing, potentially setting off mass voter challenges — unless the courts stand in the way.