DOJ Sues 30 States to Force Voter Roll Handover, Setting Up Massive Pre-Midterm Purge Battle
The Justice Department is screening state lists through SAVE — a 1980s immigration database notorious for false positives — within months of an election that triggers a federal 90-day no-purge rule.
The Justice Department's drive to obtain nearly every state's full voter registration file — and use a long-controversial federal immigration database to flag suspected non-citizens — has reached a new pitch with just six months until the November midterms, civil-rights lawyers and election officials say, raising the prospect of mass voter purges that critics warn will violate decades-old federal protections.
The DOJ is currently suing 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to hand over their statewide registration lists with attached driver's license and Social Security numbers, according to a Brennan Center for Justice tracker updated Monday. Thirteen states have already complied: Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming. The remainder have provided only public versions stripped of sensitive identifiers, or have refused outright.
President Donald Trump's administration is screening the data through SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system — a Department of Homeland Security database originally built in the 1980s to verify benefits eligibility, not voter status. The Brennan Center, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the League of Women Voters have all warned that the system has long been prone to false positives, particularly for naturalized citizens whose status changes after their initial entry into the SAVE record. An Idaho review last year flagged 760 potential non-citizens out of 1.1 million voters; only about three dozen were ultimately referred for investigation.
The legal landmine in all of this is Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which prohibits "systematic" removal programs within 90 days of a federal election. With the November midterms now less than 26 weeks away — and primaries already underway — civil-rights groups argue that any DOJ-driven mass purge would breach the statute. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have filed challenges in seven states, and federal district courts have already denied DOJ requests for private voter data in two states earlier this year.
The administration has framed the effort as routine list maintenance to root out non-citizen voters, a problem that election officials of both parties have repeatedly said is vanishingly rare. The Heritage Foundation's voter-fraud database, often cited by Republican officials, lists fewer than 100 confirmed non-citizen-voting cases nationwide over the past two decades. Yet Trump on Monday told reporters that "we are protecting the integrity of every American's vote," echoing remarks from Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has called the purge effort "the most aggressive election-integrity initiative in DOJ history."
State election officials are caught in the middle. Republican secretaries of state in Ohio and Tennessee have praised the federal review; their Democratic counterparts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona have refused to comply, citing both the NVRA and state privacy laws. The legal fight is expected to land at the Supreme Court before fall — potentially adding to a docket already reshaped by last week's Callais v. Louisiana decision, which gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Voting-rights litigators say the combined effect of Callais, the SAVE-driven purges and aggressive Republican redistricting could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters before a single ballot is cast.
Originally reported by CNN.