Federal voter checks draw warnings over privacy and ballot access
Election and privacy advocates say the expanded SAVE program could wrongly flag eligible voters and expose sensitive state voter data.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
4 min read
The Trump administration’s push to use a federal immigration-verification system to check voter rolls is drawing warnings from election and privacy experts ahead of the 2026 midterms. They say the effort could wrongly target eligible voters while concentrating sensitive personal data in federal hands.
The program at issue is the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE. According to The Verge, the system was created in 1987 to help verify eligibility for public benefits by checking federal records for immigration status.
Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice began asking nearly every state last year for broad voter registration data to compare against SAVE, The Verge reported. The requests sought full voter files and called for states to remove voters deemed ineligible within 45 days.
Those records can include Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and, in some states, voter participation history, according to The Verge. The Brennan Center says 16 states have agreed to provide full registration lists, while Texas and Alaska agreed to carry out purges tied to the checks.
DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre told The Verge that the department has authority under laws including the National Voter Registration Act to ensure states keep accurate voter rolls for federal elections. Critics quoted by The Verge argue the department is exceeding its role in elections, which states traditionally administer.
Eileen O’Connor, senior counsel at the Brennan Center and a former attorney in the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s voting section, told The Verge that the federal government lacks both the authority and expertise to manage routine state election functions. She said DOJ requests for full rolls were previously uncommon and usually tied to a lawsuit or specific investigation.
Accuracy concerns around SAVE
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson said in October 2025 that a review of more than 18 million records against SAVE data found 2,724 registered voters listed as “potential noncitizens,” according to The Verge. Texas instructed local counties to investigate further and refer confirmed noncitizens to the attorney general.
Election and privacy advocates cited by The Verge say SAVE can misidentify voters because it is not a definitive citizenship database. The Social Security Administration has described its citizenship data as a “snapshot in time,” and DHS guidance says users must verify any SAVE response that does not identify someone as a United States citizen.
That is a particular concern for recently naturalized citizens, according to The Verge, because older federal records may not reflect their current status. NPR and The Texas Tribune have reported cases in which U.S. citizens were mistakenly flagged through SAVE, The Verge noted.
Studies and state reviews cited by the Brennan Center have found noncitizen voting to be rare. A 2014 analysis published in The Washington Post found 31 credible instances of voter impersonation out of about 1 billion ballots cast since 2000.
Data security risks
John Davisson of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has sued to block the SAVE expansion, told The Verge that the administration proceeded despite known risks to voters. EPIC has also criticized DOJ’s stated safeguards for voter data as vague and insufficient.
Privacy experts quoted by The Verge warn that large stores of personal data can attract hackers. They point to the 2015 breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which exposed sensitive information on more than 22 million people, including federal workers, contractors and others connected to them.
The Verge also linked the voter-roll effort to other Trump administration attempts to combine government data, including a Department of Government Efficiency project reported by The Washington Post that sought to merge personal information across agencies. Federal data sharing is constrained by laws such as the Privacy Act of 1974, according to the Justice Department.
Davisson told The Verge that voters should check their registration status with local election officials before the midterms. State and local officials are supposed to have the final say over voter rolls, but advocates cited by The Verge warn that missed notices or fear of investigation could still keep eligible people from voting.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.