Trump's SAVE Database Flags 24,000 Suspected Noncitizens and 350,000 Dead Voters as Critics Warn of Midterm Purge

The Trump administration has quietly run more than 67 million U.S. voter registrations through a sprawling federal database in recent months, flagging roughly 24,000 names as potential noncitizens and another 350,000 as potentially deceased — a sweeping eligibility review that voting-rights groups warn could disenfranchise thousands of lawful voters just months before the November midterms.

The program, known as SAVE — short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — was originally created under federal immigration law to help state and local agencies verify the immigration status of applicants for public benefits. It was significantly expanded in April 2025 by an executive order from President Trump, who directed the Department of Homeland Security to make the system available to state election officials. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which runs SAVE, at least 25 states have since used the database to check their voter rolls, with the vast majority of submissions coming from Republican-controlled states including Texas, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told Fox News this month that the 60-million-plus registration checks have identified approximately 24,000 "potential noncitizens" and 350,000 voters who appear to be deceased. In North Carolina alone, state officials said an additional 34,000 voters were flagged as potentially dead. "This is about election integrity," Dhillon said. "If you're not a U.S. citizen, you shouldn't be on the voter rolls. Period."

Voting-rights advocates and election lawyers tell a more complicated story. Anthony Nel, a 29-year-old South African-born U.S. citizen who has voted in two presidential elections, told the Associated Press that his registration in Ohio was temporarily canceled after being flagged by SAVE. "You should know that I'm a citizen, that the passport exists," Nel said. Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old civil-rights lawyer in Texas who has voted for 50 years, said his registration was canceled without explanation. "I should not have been on any lists," Garcia said. Freda Levenson of the ACLU of Ohio warned that with some states giving voters as little as 30 days to prove eligibility, "by the time they learn about it and correct it, they may miss their opportunity to vote."

The SAVE database was not designed for voter verification, and a 2023 inspector general report at DHS found error rates as high as 11 percent when the system was queried for purposes outside its original benefits-determination mandate. State election officials are required to cross-reference SAVE flags with state records before removing voters, but in practice that step has been inconsistent. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who has championed the program, said the safeguards are adequate: "All a voter needs to do, if they get one of these letters, is show proof of citizenship. That's it."

Legal challenges are already mounting. The ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have filed federal suits in five states alleging that the SAVE-driven purges violate the National Voter Registration Act, which restricts when and how states can systematically remove voters from the rolls. A Trump-appointed federal judge in Atlanta issued a temporary restraining order this month blocking Georgia from acting on SAVE flags within 90 days of the November 3 general election. The administration has signaled it will appeal. The stakes are particularly high in battleground states such as North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, where margins in recent statewide elections have been measured in the tens of thousands of votes — within the same order of magnitude as the SAVE flags themselves.