Votebeat

Texas and federal officials announce charges against 7 related to noncitizen voting

2026-09-15T23:31:25+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

State and federal officials on Tuesday announced charges against seven people accused of voting in federal elections while not eligible citizens.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office separately said it had referred 117 cases of potential noncitizen voting to the Texas Attorney General’s Office for investigation. It also confirmed that 578 other registered voters flagged last year as potential noncitizens by a federal database are, in fact, U.S. citizens.

The criminal charges announced Tuesday, all in Tarrant County, are the result of a collaboration between the Texas Attorney General’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, the FBI, and Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a press release from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican. Six of the accused were indicted last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas said, and the seventh person was charged in a criminal complaint.

Those charged include Mexican citizen Carlos Salas Barrios, who was arrested for voting in the 2024 election, though his ballot was ultimately rejected, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice. Also charged was Nigerian national Joshua Nmelichukwu Akpom, who was arrested for making false statements in relation to naturalization, according to the release. Akpom voted illegally in the 2018 general election, but was not charged in relation to that due to the statute of limitations, according to the U.S. Department of Justice statement.

Nigerian national Helen Mayen Adams, Indian citizen Khalwinder Singh Bhengura, Mexican citizen Moises Anwar Arellano-Alba, Democratic Republic of the Congo national Celestin Katubadi, and Mexican citizen Rocio Thrasher were all charged with illegally voting in the 2024 election and false statements of citizenship to register to vote. Katubadi cast a provisional ballot that was ultimately rejected, the U.S. Department of Justice statement said.

Paxton’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and no additional details were immediately available.

Votebeat on Tuesday could not immediately find reliable contact information for the people charged.

There are more than 18 million registered voters in Texas, and more than 11 million cast ballots in the November 2024 general election. Seven people make up a tiny fraction of that number.

Nonetheless, the charges come as President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to crack down on what it has asserted is an increase of noncitizens registered to vote in the country. His administration has reportedly surged resources into investigations connected to potential cases of voter fraud and noncitizen voting.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department charged five people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Jersey with voting-related crimes.

State confirms citizenship for more than 500 flagged voters

In a separate news release Tuesday, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it had referred 117 potential cases of noncitizen voting to the Office of the Attorney General for investigation. The cases are not tied to a specific election. The referrals are part of “a larger update on Texas’ ongoing efforts to review voter citizenship ahead of the Nov. 3 election,” the news release said.

Texas officials last October sent counties a list of 2,724 potential noncitizens generated by checking the state’s voter roll of more than 18 million registered voters against a federal program used to verify citizenship, known as SAVE.

Soon after the state transmitted the names, counties began to investigate the flagged registrants, and quickly confirmed that at least some were citizens. In addition, county officials found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the state Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office told Votebeat and the Texas Tribune that it did not initially check the registrants flagged as potential noncitizens against DPS records before sending the list to county election officials to investigate. That decision prompted a March lawsuit from voting rights groups and some Texas voters who said the state should have done so. The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.

In May, state officials confirmed they would check the DPS records. In July, Christina Adkins, the state elections director, told county officials the state had been able to confirm some of the flagged voters were citizens, and said county officials should immediately reinstate any incorrectly flagged voters who had been removed from the voter roll.

The Tuesday news release said officials were able to confirm citizenship for 578 voters, and of those, 506 were flagged because their passport information was not added to the federal SAVE program until after Texas had initially checked its list.

County voter registrars in Texas received a directive to reinstate the incorrectly flagged voters Tuesday, Kristin Miles, president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said in a statement. Miles said the registrars “are grateful that due diligence performed at the state level has brought resolution for impacted voters.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Homeland Security secretary steps to forefront of Trump’s election battles

2026-09-14T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin isn’t one to shy away from a fight.

The former professional mixed martial arts fighter once challenged the Teamsters president to a brawl in the middle of a Senate hearing and clashed with U.S. officials while unsuccessfully trying to mount his own rescue mission to Afghanistan during the chaotic 2021 American withdrawal.

Now Mullin is stepping to the forefront of the Trump administration’s battle to exert more control over the fast-approaching November elections.

Mullin has threatened to lock up elections officials and withhold federal dollars from states that don’t adopt the election security measures dictated by his agency. He’s suggested that ICE officers might enter polling places on Election Day if they are trying to arrest a suspect. And he’s directed agents to step up voter fraud investigations in nine states.

The cascade of tough talk has propelled Mullin into the heart of the Trump administration’s expansive efforts to remake America’s electoral system in President Donald Trump’s vision.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the White House under President Joe Biden on voting rights issues, said Mullin appeared to be driven by one overriding ambition: “Please the boss.”

“When the fourth grade soccer coach decides that everybody runs to the ball, everybody runs to the ball,” he said. “Regardless of what your actual job is.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Mullin took over as secretary in March after the tumultuous 14-month tenure of Kristi Noem, who was forced out by Trump after a series of controversies, notably on immigration enforcement.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said during a confirmation hearing in March that barely touched on election issues.

Mullin emerged as a prominent public face of the Trump administration’s election overhaul in July when the president delivered a primetime address attacking the integrity of the nation’s voting system.

The next day, Mullin held a press conference at the White House complex, where he claimed his agency had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the rolls in four states, challenged the integrity of voting machines, and threatened to jail election officials who didn’t do enough to prevent voter fraud. States have pushed back on those numbers.

Since then, Mullin has shifted more focus onto elections, declaring that “election security is national security.”

Last week, news broke that Mullin had directed hundreds of agents to focus their efforts on hunting down noncitizens on voting rolls across the country, even though there is no evidence of a widespread problem with noncitizens voting in U.S. elections.

Mullin also told reporters that he might send ICE agents into polling places on Election Day if they get reports of undocumented immigrants inside they are trying to arrest. That stirred up renewed concerns that the Trump administration would try to use federal forces to intimidate and deter voters from casting ballots — a federal crime, Levitt and others said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson tried to calm fears by saying that “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” but that did little to assuage concerns.

“We have to respond in a very calm, collected way” to the Trump administration, said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, who leads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “We cannot respond in a chaotic manner that creates angst among the voters because we already know the administration is creating enough chaos.”

So far, Mullin’s efforts have had a limited impact. The Department of Homeland Security has quietly walked back its claims of 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls. In Nevada, for instance, the agency scaled back its estimate from 16,000 to 185.

The federal campaign to root out alleged noncitizen voting over the past month has led to the arrest of at least six noncitizens accused of voting.

Mullin has also asked the Justice Department to pursue an investigation into some voting equipment.

Levitt said Trump’s biggest leverage is the perception that he might seize ballots or send troops to polling places on Election Day, not that he would actually do so.

“My real fear is that people change their own behavior in response to the noise, rather than taking a breath and looking around and recognizing that the world outside their door doesn’t actually look like the communications world he’s trying to construct,” he said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order

2026-08-24T22:37:11+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

What happened?

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday lifted one of two injunctions against President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting, but additional legal hurdles and practical considerations could make it difficult to implement it in time for the quickly approaching November elections.

The unsigned ruling, which cut along ideological lines, focused on a relatively narrow legal question: whether the lower court’s injunction was premature. The majority made it clear that it was not deciding on the legality of Trump’s order as a whole, which is certain to be quickly challenged again in court as the administration moves to put its provisions in place.

“The court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

The ruling, made in response to an emergency request, didn’t specify which justices had joined it. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented, warned that the ruling would create a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate dissent, joined by Justice Elena Kagan.

What’s the dispute?

Shortly after Trump issued his executive order in March, states, nonprofit organizations, and Democratic Party committees filed multiple lawsuits seeking to block it. In June, in the case brought by states, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani found that some key provisions of the order were unconstitutional and blocked them from going into effect for this year’s elections.

Talwani issued an injunction specifically preventing the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit. The list included most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Trump administration appealed, arguing the judge’s order was issued prematurely, before the Postal Service and other relevant agencies had finalized their plans to carry out the order’s provisions. The administration also argued that the injunction prevented it from implementing the order in the unaffected states because of the logistical impossibility of a bifurcated mail-voting system.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Talwani’s order in late July, prompting the administration to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the order and allow the agencies to act in time for the November election. In filings, the states warned that “the consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme” and would disenfranchise voters.

On Aug. 11, Talwani issued a separate injunction against the order in the lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups, led by the League of Women Voters. The decision made it clear that her ban on implementing the law extended to all states, not just the 24 jurisdictions that brought the other lawsuit. That ruling again rejected the Trump administration argument that it was too soon to address the underlying issues.

The Trump administration again asked the Supreme Court to issue a ruling and make it clear that it would also apply to the Aug. 11 court order. If not, Solicitor General D. John Sauer warned in a court filing, it would require prolonged legal battles that would “effectively run out the clock” on the government’s ability to implement its plans.

On Friday, while the administration’s request was still pending before the Supreme Court, the Postal Service issued its final rules for implementing the order, which it said it would not put into effect for this November’s election unless and until the Supreme Court cleared the way.

The Supreme Court’s ruling addressed neither the second injunction nor the fact that the Postal Service had issued final rules, leaving observers to wonder about how those developments might affect what happens next.

“I expect that the trial court will now amend [the second] injunction and issue a new injunction that will stop USPS from implementing its now final rule. And that too may end up at the Supreme Court within a week,” wrote Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, on the Election Law Blog shortly after the ruling.

What happens now?

The Supreme Court’s ruling Monday will not be the final word on Trump’s executive order. The question before the Supreme Court was a relatively narrow one about whether Talwani issued her order prematurely, before the government had taken final action to carry out the executive order. The states and voting rights groups are likely to go back to court quickly to challenge the Postal Service and the final rules it issued last week.

Talwani has also not yet ruled on whether the order can go into effect for future elections, which she found would be premature. A parallel case involving consolidated challenges brought by nonprofit groups and Democratic Party committees is pending in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Should Trump’s executive order go into effect, it would mandate the creation of a series of lists. The Department of Homeland Security would be required to send each state a list of citizens over the age of 18. States using mail ballots would be required to send the federal government a list of all registered voters to whom they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots in key federal elections. The Postal Service’s final rule states that it will decline to deliver mail-in ballots in states that do not provide that list.

The order would also create new design standards and ballot-tracking requirements for mail ballots. Creating such a complicated process before November presents a huge challenge for the cash-strapped Postal Service.

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026
Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026
One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records, April 6, 2026
We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026
Two reminders that the rules of the 2026 election are still in flux, May 11, 2026
Federal judge refuses to block Trump executive order on mail voting — for now, May 28, 2026
USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting, May 29, 2026
Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock, June 15, 2026
Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election, June 25, 2026
Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions, July 2, 2026
Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms, Aug. 3, 2026
Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide, Aug. 11, 2026

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

A state election law in Minnesota faces a surreal test

2026-08-24T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Can Hamas members from the Gaza Strip walk in and vote in Minnesota elections?

A group of disguised conservative activists armed with hidden cameras set out to test that claim during the state’s recent primary election. The Election Day exploit put a spotlight on Minnesota’s election laws, and has now triggered investigations.

The furor centers on a Minnesota law allowing what is often referred to as “vouching.” It permits a registered voter to clear the way for up to eight other eligible voters to register and cast ballots on Election Day by signing a sworn statement affirming that those people live in their precinct.

The rarely used law has been on the books in Minnesota since 1973. It’s most typically used for residents of nursing homes who have moved out of their longtime houses but haven’t yet changed their addresses.

The activists decided to test the law at Minneapolis polling places during the August 11 primary.

One of the men, Cam Higby, dressed as a conservative Muslim woman with his face hidden by a black veil and said he misrepresented himself as a registered voter to see if he could game the vouching system. Another, James O’Keefe, dressed in traditional Muslim clothing, appeared to impersonate at least two registered voters at different polling places, and said he wanted to vouch for prospective voters. Another activist, Anthony Rubin, walked into a polling place saying he wanted to vouch for several people he claimed were newly arrived Hamas members from the Gaza Strip.

None of the activists said they went so far as to try to cast a ballot in the election. But they did release a series of carefully edited videos suggesting that the Minnesota vouching system is so lax that it makes it possible for virtually anyone to vote in an American election, creating a furor on social media.

What is vouching and how does it work?

So, how does the Minnesota law work, and is it unusual? To use the system, the person doing the vouching has to be either a registered voter in the precinct or an employee of a residential facility — such as a nursing home — vouching for a resident of that facility. That person must sign a sworn statement saying that they know that the people they are vouching for live in the precinct. This can serve as proof of residency for eligible voters looking to register to vote on Election Day, in lieu of documentation such as a state ID or utility bill.

The person being vouched for doesn’t have to show a physical ID to verify their identity, but must still fill out the standard voter registration application, which requires them to affirm that they are a U.S. citizen and eligible to vote in Minnesota. It also asks them to provide a Minnesota driver’s license number, a state ID number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number. That information is checked later by elections officials to make sure it’s legit. Lying on a voter registration form is a felony carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines.

In Minnesota’s 2024 general election, about 19,000 voters used the vouching system, about 0.6% of the 3.2 million people who cast ballots that year. Of that 19,000, the vast majority were already registered voters updating existing registrations on Election Day with information such as a new address. Around 5,500 people were voting for the first time.

Minnesota’s vouching law has become a prime target for conservative activists who say the process exposes the vulnerabilities of a system that doesn’t require voters to show an ID. A registered voter can vouch for up to eight people. Someone working in a nursing home can vouch for an unlimited number of residents.

“With tens of thousands of voters registering through vouching across recent cycles, without basic verification safeguards, the vouching policies and practices leave Minnesota’s elections vulnerable and risk Americans’ votes being canceled by fraudulently registered voters,” Will Scolinos, an attorney at conservative nonprofit America First Legal, said in May.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon has publicly defended the law. In a letter earlier this year to the U.S. Department of Justice, he pointed out that other states also allow some forms of vouching. For example, Alaska allows state voter identification requirements to be waived if the election official knows the identity of the voter, Iowa allows registered voters to vouch for someone from the same precinct without documentation on Election Day, and Arkansas permits staff members to vouch for residents of long-term or residential care facilities.

Simon denounced the activists’ Election Day operation as “outrageous and totally unacceptable.”

The videotaped incidents were reported by poll workers on Election Day and are under investigation by elections officials and local law enforcement, Simon said.

“The conduct was disturbing,” Simon told Votebeat. Simon said the law has long had bipartisan support in the state as a way to expand voter access, especially for elderly residents.

“This is America,” he added. “Do what you want. If you want to dress up as someone, look no further than Borat and Sacha Baron Cohen. But we have to draw the line.”

Could those people claiming to be newly arrived Hamas members from the Gaza Strip have voted?

To do so, the prospective voucher would have had to break several laws by impersonating a registered voter and signing an affidavit falsely claiming that the other people lived in the precinct. Then the fake Hamas members would have had to break the law by providing false information about their identity and their eligibility to vote in Minnesota.

It is unclear from the videos released by the activists if the poll workers detailed the other steps they would have to go through before they could vote. Anthony Rubin declined to comment or release the raw footage from the incidents. O’Keefe did not respond to a request for comment.

Higby said the group was trying to expose shortfalls in the state election system.

“The goal was never to vote, it was never to touch a ballot, it was never to obtain a ballot,” Higby told Votebeat. “It was simply to test the system and see if poll workers would be prepared to allow me to vote.”

But Simon said in his 11 years as Minnesota’s top elections official, he’d never seen a single case of someone trying to game the vouching system to illegally vote.

“Could someone scam the system?” he asked. “Anything is possible. But you have to look at what is probable.”

Simon said he’d also never before seen a case of someone impersonating a voter.

“There is no end to the creativity of people who are looking to do wrong,” he said. “You have to look at the track record and the incentive structure. There’s a high likelihood that someone is going to get caught.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

The SAVE system isn’t reliable, but it still might be useful. One Arizona county’s experience shows how.

2026-08-22T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Recorder Michelle Burchill was intrigued when she first learned about a newly expanded federal tool for checking voters’ citizenship.

She had helped run elections in bright-red Yavapai County, Arizona, for about six years — and while she entered the field as an elections skeptic, she had gained trust in election systems during her time with the county. Still, Burchill, a Republican, wanted to confidently tell her voters, neighbors, and friends that her county’s voter roll was free of any noncitizen voters.

So, earlier this year, she began running her county’s voter list through the expanded tool, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

That system, maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was originally built to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. Under President Donald Trump’s administration, it has been transformed into a mass voter verification tool — and a political lightning rod. Trump and his allies have used its findings to claim that there are thousands of noncitizens registered to vote across the country; Democrats have decried it as a voter suppression tool after it was found to have falsely flagged eligible voters as noncitizens.

Burchill, who spent months running her county’s voter rolls through the system, also saw false positives. But she said the system helped her confirm the citizenship status of hundreds of voters who hadn’t submitted a birth certificate, passport, or other documents required by Arizona law to vote a full ballot.

She also found the tool useful for identifying voters who had died and needed to be removed from the rolls, as well as vulnerabilities in the state’s aging voter registration system. And in the process, she found 30 noncitizens on her voter list, representing about 0.01% of her county’s total voters. She reached that number only after using other methods and databases to double-check the citizenship status of voters that the SAVE system initially flagged as ineligible.

Nationwide, virtually every election official aims to maintain a clean voter roll. The politicization of SAVE — which, after a series of court decisions, is now in legal limbo — has problematized its use for routine, nonpartisan maintenance. But Burchill’s experience shows that the system could be helpful — when used responsibly. Her county is now among the first jurisdictions in the country to demonstrate the system’s broader potential as a voter roll maintenance tool.

“The SAVE database is not the only useful tool on which we should rely for voter registration purposes,” Burchill wrote in an Aug. 7 report summarizing her findings, “but in my view, it has been by far the most valuable.”

Nationally, SAVE has made headlines for false positives

Burchill’s experiment stands in stark contrast to the vast majority of jurisdictions nationwide. States and counties that have run their data through SAVE — which tend to be run by Republicans — have largely used it to confirm their suspicions that the rolls are laden with noncitizens. Most Democratic-run jurisdictions, by contrast, have not even used it at all.

Until last year, the tool had a fairly limited use. It could confirm citizenship for certain voters, but only if election officials had specific immigration and naturalization identification numbers issued by the Department of Homeland Security.

But then, in March 2025, Trump issued a sweeping executive order that required the agency to make federal citizenship data available to state and local election officials and provide them with free access to federal systems for verifying voters’ eligibility.

So, late last year, the Trump administration upgraded the system to allow election officials to upload their voter lists to it to scan for noncitizens. And initially, the system indicated thousands of noncitizens were present on their voter rolls. As of June, the Department of Homeland Security said that states had run 60 million voter records through the system — about a third of all registered voters in the U.S. — and 24,000 were flagged as potential noncitizens.

But as election officials began investigating individual cases, they quickly realized that the tool was returning false positives.

In Missouri, the program wrongly flagged hundreds of voters as noncitizens. Officials didn’t attempt to confirm that information before limiting voters’ ability to cast ballots.

In Texas, the system said more than 2,000 of the state’s roughly 18 million voters were noncitizens. County election officials have since determined some of the flagged voters were citizens, though it isn’t clear exactly how many.

In Arizona, just one other county — Maricopa, the state’s most populous — has said it’s used the tool. There, Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, announced in February that his office had identified 137 potential noncitizens registered to vote. But Heap didn’t answer questions about whether he vetted the SAVE system’s results. Later, he said that he intended to change the registration status of the flagged voters, though experts questioned whether he’d followed the appropriate steps to notify them before doing so.

Prosecutors continue to investigate the voters referred by Heap. They have yet to issue information about whether the voters are noncitizens and whether they could be charged with illegally voting.

Meanwhile, several other jurisdictions, including counties in Texas, have ended up reinstating some voters who were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens by the SAVE system.

How Yavapai County ran its voter rolls through SAVE

Burchill began her experiment with the SAVE tool on a small scale — by examining her county’s roughly 300 federal-only voters.

Arizona requires people to submit documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote — a step beyond most states and the federal government, which only require voters to attest to their citizenship under the penalty of perjury. Arizonans who register with a federal form but don’t submit such documents are allowed to vote in federal contests, but not state ones. As such, the state has thousands of federal-only voters — people who haven’t proven citizenship, but are still allowed to vote in presidential and congressional races.

Burchill wondered whether the SAVE system could confirm citizenship for any of them. If so, they could be registered as full-ballot voters, expanding voting access.

Her idea worked. The tool confirmed the citizenship of 255 federal-only voters — all of whom can now vote full ballots. A handful came back as deceased, and several dozen came back with no determination. No noncitizens were found, backing analyses that have suggested most federal-only voters are students, homeless, or born on tribal lands, where birth certificates were not commonly issued for decades.

Burchill then used SAVE to check a list of 6,781 voters impacted by a longstanding state coding error. The coding issue made it difficult to determine whether those individuals had provided proof of citizenship when they registered.

The results surprised her. Several active voters were flagged as deceased, suggesting that there could be significantly more dead voters on the county’s rolls than previously known. Nationally, many states share death information with one another — but not all of them. That means local election officials aren’t necessarily automatically notified when a voter dies.

Another 10 voters — one of whom had previously cast a ballot — were flagged as noncitizens and ultimately had their registrations cancelled.

Before doing so, though, Burchill took additional steps to try to confirm whether these voters actually were deceased or noncitizens. The group of suspected noncitizens were sent formal notices requesting they submit documents proving their status, as prescribed by state law, and given 35 days to respond. Burchill, keeping in mind SAVE’s spotty track record, also personally called, emailed, and mailed letters to those flagged by the tool.

Finally, Burchill decided to run her county’s full voter roll through SAVE. The system confirmed citizenship for the vast majority of voters. It identified 39 as noncitizens, but through further vetting, Burchill said she was able to track down citizenship documents for 28 of them. The other 11 were removed from the voter rolls after the requisite notification and waiting period.

In the process of running the checks, Burchill also discovered nine other noncitizen voters — and a potential glitch in the state’s systems.

In total, she used SAVE to confirm the citizenship of 193,114 voters — 99.8% of those on her county’s roll. Burchill ultimately identified and cancelled the registrations of 30 individuals flagged as noncitizens, four of whom had previously voted.

The takeaways

Burchill’s report concluded the SAVE system, while flawed, can be used to constructively clean voter rolls and build confidence in elections, provided that its data is vetted carefully.

Hers is the most detailed, but not only, example.

Officials in Florida used the tool to help investigate specific voters after receiving information that they might be noncitizens. In a Jan. 15 report, they said they had looked into more than 835 voters and, after vetting them with the SAVE system and other tools, found that about 200 were ineligible to vote.

In Utah, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, wrote in a May 27 report that while SAVE could not reliably determine whether a voter was not a citizen without crosschecks, it reliably identified people who were citizens. She said the tool helped “identify and fix potential vulnerabilities in our voter registration processes while also protecting the rights of eligible voters.”

Burchill said her experiment also raised new questions about Arizona’s election laws and systems. For instance, some voters were flagged by the SAVE system as having no record or determination of citizenship. She was able to confirm most of those voters’ citizenship statuses in the Arizona Voter Information Database, the state’s voter registration system — but not all. That means some remain in limbo.

“These voters may very well be citizens, but we don’t have proof of either status,” Burchill wrote, adding that the voters would remain on the rolls under existing Arizona laws.

Burchill said the experiment also raised potential concerns with AVID that state and local officials are still working to fully understand. While attempting to confirm noncitizens flagged by the SAVE system, she discovered that several had seen their citizenship status change in motor vehicle records — without any notification to election officials.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, which administers AVID, said officials were looking into the changes described by Burchill. Jones added that her office “does not register voters, nor do we change voter information,” calling the issue “an outstanding question for our office as well.”

And Burchill questioned what election officials should do if they become aware of a potential noncitizen on the rolls within 90 days of an election. Under federal law, officials are barred from conducting systematic removals of ineligible voters during that period.

“This topic has not been addressed in the past but is now something that needs to be addressed in law,” Burchill wrote, adding that the SAVE system created an “uncomfortable” tension with the mandated pause.

SAVE is currently mired in lawsuits. In June, a federal judge blocked the use of the expanded tool, ruling that it violated citizens’ privacy and voting rights. That ruling prompted the Department of Homeland Security to pause certain features in the SAVE system to comply. Last month, a different federal judge ordered the agency to restore access to the revamped system for four states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana — due to an earlier settlement agreement.

Burchill said her use of the SAVE system didn’t infringe on any voters’ privacy. The only information she ran through SAVE was voters’ names, dates of birth, and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. That information, she said, is already on record in the system.

“I’ve never understood why people keep saying there’s privacy concerns when we are just matching our info to what the database has,” she told Votebeat in a text message. “The whole point is for them to respond and say, ‘Yes, the information is correct and matches.’”

She said she thought it was unfortunate that the courts had limited SAVE’s use and believes the tool can still be valuable.

“I am more confident in our voter roll today than ever before, and that has always been my goal,” she wrote in her report.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

A new Trump administration analysis claims noncitizens voted in 2020. Experts are questioning its validity.

2026-08-20T12:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump this week unveiled another effort by his administration to raise questions about the outcome of the 2020 election he lost: an unusual U.S. Census Bureau analysis concluding with “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election.

Trump touted the finding on social media and wrote that it supports his long-running false claims that he actually won the 2020 election.

But experts said there are substantial questions about the Census Bureau study’s methodology and validity. And even if 24,000 noncitizens had voted in 2020, it wouldn’t have been enough to change the election’s outcome.

The seven-page Census Bureau report said researchers examined more than 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election and determined with “high confidence” that more than 24,000 of them were noncitizens. If so, that number would be less than 0.019% of the sample.

Trump said census researchers are still analyzing another 32 million voters and predicted that the number of illegal noncitizen votes would “explode” after that was done.

The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. But experts said some aspects of the bureau’s release raise fundamental questions.

Most Census Bureau reports identify the authors of the report and detail the reliability of the data they are using. This analysis did neither.

“A properly done Census report would have had that information and the fact that it is missing is glaring and makes me think that they are hiding something,” said Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute who has worked as a contractor on Census Bureau reports.

Terri Ann Lowenthal, who served as staff director for the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee overseeing the Census Bureau from 1987 to 1994, said the report’s minimal methodological information raised questions about the accuracy of the results.

Lowenthal said the report was “beneath the Census Bureau’s stellar reputation.” The failure to include the names of any career staff members, she said, suggested that the work may have been done by someone with a political agenda “and may not reflect the sound, reputable analysis for which the Census Bureau is known.”

Trump administration searches for noncitizen voters

Trump has focused the efforts of his second administration on rooting out voter fraud, especially any instance of illegal voting by noncitizens, which audits, investigations, and studies have found happens only rarely. But the federal government doesn’t possess a comprehensive database of citizens, and efforts to match different data sets have so far yielded inaccurate results.

The administration pushed states to run millions of records of registered voters through a revamped federal data tool to check if they were citizens. But election officials found the system, which cross-referenced federal records from various federal agencies, in some cases erroneously flagged citizens. In June, a federal judge blocked the use of the overhauled tool, finding it threatened privacy and voting rights.

In a televised primetime speech on July 16, Trump said his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the voter rolls of just four states: New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Officials in all four states pushed back on Trump’s claims and said they didn’t understand how the administration arrived at those numbers. The Trump administration has yet to provide any detail on its methodology in that case either.

The president has lobbied for federal legislation to require people registering to vote to prove their citizenship, and he repeated that call when releasing the Census Bureau findings Tuesday, describing it as his highest legislative priority. But the effort has stalled in the U.S. Senate. He has also released two sweeping executive orders on elections, but their major provisions have been so far blocked by federal courts.

Questions surround Trump administration’s data analysis

The voting data used in the analysis was provided by Data-Clear, a business in Virginia that secured an $885,000 Census Bureau contract from former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024. Carolyn Carlson, Data-Clear’s president and founder, said she provided nationwide voting data to the bureau that year as part of a project to try and prevent an undercount of minority voters in the 2030 census.

Carlson said she was surprised to see the data she provided used in the new review of noncitizen voters.

The report says the Census Bureau matched the Data-Clear voter files with federal immigration records to determine if people were citizens and eligible to vote. The report offers only general descriptions of how and when it was able to match verifiable information.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the Biden White House on voting rights issues, said a typical analysis would include caveats around the possible margin of error, and the 24,000 figure for noncitizen voters could be within it. However, the Census Bureau report doesn’t specify one.

“In most statistical exercises, it’s not unthinkable that there might be 0.019% false positives – and if that were the case here, that would turn the total conclusions to zero,” he said.

Should the analysis hold up to scrutiny, the underlying numbers showed that they would not involve enough voters to change the result of the 2020 election. The report said it found 500 noncitizens illegally cast ballots in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The survey said it identified 1,100 noncitizens who cast ballots in Arizona, which Trump lost by more than 10,000 votes. And the report cannot say whether those voters supported Trump or Biden.

In response to questions about whether the release supported the president’s assertion, the White House responded with a link to a social media post by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms

2026-08-03T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Elections are back before the U.S. Supreme Court: The Trump administration is asking the justices to quickly lift an order blocking its efforts to put new restrictions on mail-in voting for the fast-approaching midterm elections.

It’s unclear how the justices will rule, but the case focuses on a narrow question of whether or not the lower courts issued premature rulings rather than the broader questions about the legality of the executive order.

But no matter what the court decides this time, a series of practical and legal challenges make it increasingly unlikely that the federal government can impose new rules giving the U.S. Postal Service the power to block Americans from voting by mail in November’s elections.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justice designated to handle emergency appeals from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered the plaintiff states to respond by Monday to the Trump administration’s filing, and a decision could come any time after that. But there are already fewer than 100 days left until the election, and the U.S. Postal Service itself said in July court filings that it is running out of time to carry out the changes the president is demanding in time for this election.

The heart of the matter is President Donald Trump’s March 2026 executive order, which attempts to restrict mail-in voting by requiring creation of a series of lists of people eligible to vote, including one it requires the U.S. Postal Service to secure from states listing all voters eligible to use mail ballots. The order attempts to give the postal service unprecedented new power to prevent delivery of mail ballots to anyone who is not on these lists.

States, nonprofit groups, and Democratic party committees quickly sued over the order, which they argued was unconstitutional because the president has no authority over elections. Federal courts have since issued conflicting orders on the question of whether blocking major provisions would be premature because government agencies hadn’t yet taken final action to carry out Trump’s orders.

A judge in federal court in Washington, D.C. declined to block the challenged provisions, but last month, in a case brought by states, a federal judge in Massachusetts prevented the Trump administration from moving ahead with the plans, putting the whole issue on hold. Separate appeals courts have now upheld both rulings, leaving the Massachusetts injunction in place for now, which is what prompted the Trump administration to file its emergency appeal last week with the Supreme Court.

Still, “I think everyone agrees that it’s not going to be implemented for 2026,” said Derek Muller, an elections specialist at the University of Notre Dame Law School. “The logistics are so horrific.”

To be clear, the issue the court is now being asked to decide isn’t about the legal merits of the executive order itself, or whether Trump has the authority to issue it. The Trump administration is arguing that the federal courts blocked the executive order prematurely because the government is still drafting the rules, which haven’t been finalized. Until the rules are final, the Trump administration argues, the states can’t prove that there is any harm that should be blocked by the courts, or that agencies won’t carry out the order in a way that complies with the law.

The Massachusetts court’s injunction “is especially indefensible because the agencies are still deliberating over how (if at all) to implement the Order, yet the district court preemptively decided that whatever the agencies may choose to do will necessarily be unlawful,” the Trump administration argued in its 116-page filing.

That’s essentially what the other panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia concluded in a ruling Tuesday when it upheld a lower court’s decision not to block the executive order — though the plaintiffs in that case are nonprofit groups and party committees rather than states.

“The scope of the issues at play” before the Supreme Court “are really, really narrow,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights and rule of law at the Campaign Legal Center, one of the lawyers involved in bringing the Washington, D.C. case.

And like Muller, Lang said it appears unlikely that the government would have the time to push through the changes before November.

“The kinds of dramatic changes they are asking for in election administration are not the kinds of things that you get done in a few months’ time,” Lang said. “As a practical reality, I don’t think they can do this in any non-chaotic way.”

If the Supreme Court were to side with the Trump administration this time, an army of lawyers across the country is prepared to again ask the courts to step in as soon as the new rules are finalized.

Even the appeals court judges in Washington that agreed the legal challenges were premature also suggested that they had some qualms about the executive order.

“Plaintiffs have identified a number of serious questions concerning the lawfulness of proposed actions if implemented on the threshold of the upcoming federal election,” the court said in its ruling.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Texas confirms some flagged as potential noncitizens on voter rolls had provided DPS proof of citizenship

2026-07-30T19:11:21+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Election officials across the state should immediately reinstate some voters who were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens through a federal program, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told county officials Wednesday.

Christina Adkins, the state elections director, told county officials the state had reviewed Texas Department of Public Safety records confirming the citizenship of some of the 2,724 registered voters who were flagged as potential noncitizens, according to an audio recording of her comments obtained by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune, as well as election officials who heard them. The voters were flagged after the state checked its voter roll through a federal program called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify the citizenship of people registered to vote.

Adkins said the state is still working through the data and that she couldn’t yet say how many of the 2,724 people had provided proof of citizenship to DPS and should thus be reinstated if they were already removed from the voter roll. She characterized SAVE as having “some inaccurate information” but added that “most of the data that we got out of SAVE was consistent with what DPS had.”

According to election officials, the secretary of state’s office said it plans in the coming days to send voter registrars additional information from DPS showing some of the flagged registered voters had in fact provided proof of citizenship to DPS while registering to vote or obtaining a driver’s license or state ID.

There isn’t yet an exact number of how many U.S. citizens’ registrations were actually canceled or how many were canceled in total by counties after being flagged by SAVE, said Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.

“Counties are following appropriate list maintenance procedures under Texas law, and will ensure eligible voters whose registrations were cancelled are reinstated, and that only U.S. citizens remain on the voter rolls,” Miles said in an emailed statement.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the audio recording of the meeting with election officials, Adkins told election officials that once they receive the new information and review it, the state believes reinstating voters who had provided proof is “a very important thing to do to make sure that these individuals are not further impacted now that we have more information at our disposal.”

The state used a federal tool to flag potential noncitizens on the voter rolls

Texas officials last fall sent counties information on the 2,724 potential noncitizens generated by checking the state’s voter roll of more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE, something the Trump administration has vigorously urged all states to do since it overhauled SAVE shortly after Trump came back into office last January.

Counties mailed notices asking those registrants to provide documented proof of citizenship.

Some voters responded to the letters from voter registrars and confirmed they were U.S. citizens, although a total number of how many is not yet available. The registrations of voters who did not respond to notices within 30 days were canceled. It isn’t clear how many were confirmed to be noncitizens. In some counties, officials said some people on the list had submitted an application to their local county voter registrar that accurately noted they were not U.S. citizens but were nonetheless added to the voter roll in error by county officials, and those have since been removed.

Under state law, if a voter’s registration is canceled for failing to respond to a request for proof of citizenship, their registration can be immediately reinstated by providing proof of U.S. citizenship to an elections office or at a polling location. The new information by DPS would immediately trigger the reinstatement without requiring further action from the voter.

Through their investigations, election officials also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through DPS. The agency requires proof of citizenship or proof of lawful presence, such as a work visa or green card, to obtain a state driver’s license or state ID, and keeps copies of such documentation on file.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office in December told Votebeat and the Tribune that it did not initially check the registrants flagged as potential noncitizens against DPS’ records before sending the list to county election officials to investigate. That decision prompted a March lawsuit from voting rights groups and some Texas voters who said the state should have done so. The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.

Votebeat reported that the secretary of state’s office later asked DPS to check the list of 2,724 potential noncitizens flagged by the SAVE program against its records to verify whether any of them had already provided proof of citizenship. Email communications between secretary of state and DPS officials obtained by Votebeat via a public records request show the secretary of state’s office made the request on May 4, with DPS completing its review June 16.

Election officials in multiple states have raised questions about SAVE’s accuracy

Experts and election officials have raised concerns about the SAVE program’s accuracy, and officials in multiple states have said it incorrectly flagged at least some citizens.

In April, former Secretary of State Jane Nelson sent a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services raising concerns about the accuracy of the SAVE program after county election officials found citizens had been wrongly flagged as noncitizens. Adkins in May also told county officials that her office had found “discrepancies” with the data, though she stressed that it was generally fairly accurate.

States’ use of the revamped SAVE tool is currently in limbo in the wake of multiple court rulings. In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights. That ruling prompted the Trump administration to pause certain features in the SAVE system to comply. However, last month a different federal judge ordered Homeland Security to restore access to the revamped system for four states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Indiana — due to an earlier settlement agreement.

The rulings also do not prevent Texas or other states that previously used the revamped program from continuing to investigate the status of any potential noncitizens it flagged on the voter roll.

The Trump administration has focused intently on searching for noncitizen voters. The Department of Justice asked all 50 states to turn over their voter rolls, seeking discrepancies and ineligible voters, and sued 30 states that declined to do so. Federal judges have so far ruled against the department in 18 of those cases.

Texas, though, is among the states that voluntarily agreed to share its unredacted list of more than 18 million registered voters, including personal information such as dates of birth, driver license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

In April, at least three Texas counties received subpoenas from DOJ seeking individuals’ voter registration information and voting history.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

The noncitizen voter mystery: New Trump numbers raise more questions than answers

2026-07-27T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The polarizing debate over noncitizen voters escalated last week when New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that an apparent software glitch had led to the unintended registration of 6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024, 400 of whom voted in recent elections.

In a hastily called press conference, Sherrill placed the blame on her predecessor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, and said she was taking immediate steps to fix the problems.

Sherrill’s 20-minute briefing raised as many questions as it provided answers. How did a software glitch at the state’s motor vehicles agency lead to adding people who said they weren’t citizens to the state’s voter rolls? Who discovered the problem back in 2024? Why didn’t state officials alert the public when they first learned about the mistake? And what did state officials do about the people who were improperly registered at the time?

Sherrill, who took office in January and said she learned about the problems the week of July 13, said she’s ordered an independent investigation. That’s not good enough for Republicans in Washington and Trenton.

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding that New Jersey hand over the names of the 6,600 people by Tuesday. New Jersey Republicans question Sherrill’s software glitch explanation and are calling for a legislative investigation.

The New Jersey issue isn’t coming in a vacuum. President Donald Trump has long argued that ineligible noncitizen voters cost him the 2020 election, though no evidence has emerged to support that. His second administration has been focused on rooting out any noncitizen voting, and his top legislative priority is election legislation that he says will block it.

In a televised primetime speech on July 16, Trump said his administration had found 250,000 noncitizen voters on the voter rolls of four states: New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

Officials in all four states pushed back on Trump’s claims, and said they didn’t understand how the administration arrived at those numbers.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar called the numbers “wildly speculative.” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt said that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country.” Even in New Jersey, the 6,600 noncitizen voters discovered by the state did not come close to the 35,152 that the Trump administration claimed to have found in the state. “Do I think that the latest round that he has put out is in some way an attempt to undermine our elections in this country? Yes I do,” Sherrill said at her press conference.

How did the Homeland Security Department come up with the estimates? The Trump administration isn’t saying. But the letters the Department of Homeland Security sent to the four states to notify them of the findings provide some interesting clues.

For instance, the letters qualify the numbers in ways that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not in their public statements.

“We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” Mullin said in a briefing the day after Trump’s speech.

But the letters are more careful in making that claim.

In California, for example, the letter from Mullin said there “may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.” The letter then went on to say that the government found 81,336 registered voters in California’s public voter registration database with names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers that match those of noncitizens in federal files. That’s less than half the overall estimate; the letter doesn’t explain where the extra 109,496 came from.

In Pennsylvania, Mullin’s letter said the government matched the data of 8,594 registrants to a noncitizen, out of a total of 14,576 potential noncitizens it identified. Nevada’s letter said there were 8,576 matches out of 15,903 potential noncitizens. And according to the Shore News Network, New Jersey’s letter said there were 19,497 matches out of 35,152 potential noncitizens.

Altogether, these numbers in Mullin’s letters say the department has matches for just 118,003 of the 256,463 noncitizens the government is asserting have registered to vote.

The letters specify that Trump officials relied on each state’s public data files. All four of these states are among the 30 that have gone to court to block the federal government from getting access to unredacted versions of their voter rolls, which would include sensitive personal information, such as driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.

The public versions of the voter rolls only include basic information about individual voters, such as their names and addresses, so it’s unclear how the government could have matched individuals based on social security numbers as it says it did.

It’s likely that even the 118,003 number is too high. States that have audited their own voter rolls for noncitizens or checked them against federal databases by using the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program have found noncitizen totals that are far less concerning.

Upon further investigation, several states have also found that SAVE — which works similarly to the methodology that Mullin apparently used — overestimated the number of noncitizens on their rolls, leading experts and elections officials to warn that the system was unreliable.

Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, called the 250,000 estimate “puzzling and concerning” and said there was no reason to believe the number of noncitizens on the voter rolls is actually that high.

“There are all sorts of reasons why you would get a huge number of false positives,” he said. “There is no reason to trust anything in the order of that 250,000 number. That will absolutely fall apart under any scrutiny.”

Correction, July 31: An earlier version of this story misstated the date of President Donald Trump’s primetime address on election issues. It was on July 16.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

What 250 years of voting rights battles tell us about today

2026-07-04T12:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Happy Fourth of July, on this 250th anniversary of the United States. We’re living through extraordinary times in American democracy, as President Trump presses for greater federal control over elections and redistricting slips loose from its once-a-decade rhythm. As always, Votebeat is focused on an essential part of it: who gets to vote, who makes the rules, and what those votes are worth.

That question has loomed over the nation from the beginning. Voting history is often framed as a steady expansion from white male landowners to everyone else. The truth is messier. States have always experimented with expanding the franchise, retracting it, and expanding it again.

Voting rights have long varied from state to state

The Constitution has never contained a broad, affirmative right to vote, which helps explain why voting in America has always depended so much on where you live.

Some states expanded the vote earlier than we typically remember. Vermont, for example, adopted a broad franchise before the federal Constitution existed. Others expanded the franchise and later narrowed it: Revolutionary Pennsylvania extended voting rights to taxpaying men before limiting the vote to white men in 1838. Taken together, these examples show that American voting rights have never moved in one direction for everyone at once.

Let’s start with Vermont, one of the earliest examples of a state taking an unusually expansive view of who should have the vote. In 1777, before the federal Constitution existed, Vermont adopted its own, eliminating both property and taxpaying requirements for voting. Why? Because of a man whose name you’ve probably heard before: Ethan Allen.

A painting depicts Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys demanding the surrender of British forces at Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. Allen’s militia is better remembered for its Revolutionary War exploits, but its fight against New York’s authority also helped create the breakaway political community that adopted Vermont’s unusually broad early voting rules.

Allen led what historian Alexander Keyssar describes in his book “The Right to Vote” as an “unruly political—and military—process” involving his militia group, the Green Mountain Boys. Allen’s men roamed what ultimately became Vermont back when New York still claimed the territory, resisting New York’s authority by stopping sheriffs, intimidating New York-backed settlers, burning buildings, and sometimes flogging opponents.

Their campaign was not specifically about expanding the franchise. It began as a fight over land, sovereignty, and New York’s authority in the territory that became Vermont. But by helping create a breakaway political community outside New York’s control, the Green Mountain Boys also helped create the conditions for a very different constitution — one that rejected New York’s property-based voting system and allowed any adult man who took the Freeman’s Oath to vote.

Then came the U.S. Constitution. The 1787 document did not grant anyone the right to vote, instead deferring to states to determine the makeup of their own electorate. Whoever a state allowed to vote for its own legislature could also vote for members of Congress from that state. States, not the federal government, were left to decide who “the people” were. Vermont, therefore, could continue to coexist with neighboring New York despite radically different approaches to the franchise.

That flexibility produced inconsistency. In 1780, Massachusetts dropped racial exclusions for voting but kept property ownership at the center of political rights. That meant a free Black man who met the property requirement could vote while a poor white man who did not meet it could not. Property, race, gender, dependency, and local law interacted unevenly in the early American electorate.

Some states also gave voting rights and then took them away. In New Jersey, the state’s 1776 Constitution and a 1790 election law allowed some property-owning women and Black men to vote. That changed in 1807, when the Legislature limited voting to “free, white male” citizens.

An 1808 article in the Trenton Federalist said the new law “restricted all that has made our elections disagreeable, contentious and corrupt; all Females and Negroes being now deprived of a vote, who, not being eligible to nor much acquainted with the affairs of government, need not any longer be made use of to answer a party purpose.”

The same state-by-state experimentation complicates another assumption we often make now: that citizenship and voting have always been inseparable.

For much of American history, they were not. Some territories and newer western states used the franchise as an inducement to settlers. If they wanted people to move west, build towns, work land, pay taxes, and bind their futures to a new place, the vote was often part of the offer.

Wisconsin became the clearest example. In 1848, it allowed immigrants to vote if they had lived in the United States for two years and filed papers declaring their intent to become citizens. Michigan and Indiana soon followed, as did the Oregon and Minnesota territories. Later, similar rules spread across parts of the South and West.

But here, too, societal pressures prompted change. States began repealing noncitizen voting laws in the late 19th century. The backlash accelerated around World War I, amid rising xenophobia and suspicion of immigrants’ loyalty. Arkansas was the last state to end the practice, doing so in 1926.

Which brings us to the arguments over voting that Votebeat covers now.

Today, the fight for voting rights revolves around equal representation

For much of American history, the central question around voting rights was who could get through the door: who could register, who could cast a ballot, and who was excluded by law. But there is another question on the other side of the franchise. In 1976, legal scholar Gerhard Casper argued that American debates had long focused on “the right to be a voter,” rather than the harder problem of representation. Voting, he wrote, “is supposedly performed with a goal in mind — representation; but voting does not in itself necessarily entail representation.”

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 tried to answer both problems. It gave federal force to the principle that citizens could not be denied the ballot because of race, and Section 2 later became one of the main tools for challenging election rules and maps that diluted minority voters’ ability to turn votes into representation.

That issue is at the core of the modern fights over gerrymandering. A voter can be eligible, registered, and able to cast a ballot, and still live under maps that weaken the political power of that vote.

Louisiana is the latest example. After years of litigation over whether Black voters in the state had a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, the Supreme Court’s Callais decision struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district and narrowed how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting. Many voting rights scholars and advocates have described the decision as a major rollback — not because it removes anyone from the voter rolls, but because it changes what legal protection remains when votes are diluted by district lines.

That is not the same thing as states limiting or even taking away voting rights based on property requirements, gender, or citizenship status. But it belongs in the same history. The rules change. The line moves. And sometimes, as American history keeps reminding us, it moves backward.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Legal ruling blocking Trump hunt for noncitizen voters may not help those already flagged

2026-06-29T09:00:00+00:00

A few days ago, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s use of a revamped immigration database to identify noncitizens who have registered to vote across the country.

The pointed 75-page ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said the federal government’s actions threatened Americans’ privacy and voting rights.

But what does it mean for the estimated 24,000 registered voters that the Department of Homeland Security said it has already identified for further investigation using the revamped system that’s now been deemed a threat to Americans’ privacy?

Sooknanan’s ruling doesn’t put a halt to any of the investigations that have been carried out in more than two dozen states that used the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, better known as SAVE, over the past year to identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls.

“The ruling turns the spigot off of a broken system, but it doesn’t go backwards in time,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “The reality is that the thousands of people that are caught up now in the system are still at risk.”

Live event: Will the midterms happen? Your election questions, answered

Texas, for example, flagged more than 2,700 people as potential noncitizens using the SAVE database. Last fall, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it had sent lists to county elections officials and asked them to investigate. As Votebeat previously reported, hundreds of the voters flagged for investigation had likely already proven their citizenship when registering to vote.

Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said most Texas counties had already completed their investigations. County officials sent out letters to those on the list and gave people 30 days to provide proof they were eligible to vote.

“Most of our jurisdictions went through the process and, I hate to say, kind of wiped their hands of it,” McGinn said. “As far as the counties are concerned, they completed their part of the process.”

While the exact number of people removed from voter rolls because of the check has not been made public, McGinn estimated that 75% to 80% of those in smaller counties have already been taken off the lists because they did not respond within the 30 days.

“Candidly, I think it was more political than practical in Texas,” he said. “You have 19 million registered voters in Texas and 2,700 is a small percentage. We still can’t consistently find evidence that ineligible voters are having an impact on elections, which speaks to how secure our elections process is.”

Dan Vicuña, the senior policy director for voting and fair representation at Common Cause, which filed a legal brief in support of the League of Women Voters’ lawsuit, said the judge’s ruling would at least give people who had been improperly removed from voter registration lists because of states’ use of SAVE a chance to challenge the decisions.

“It will provide some strong avenues for people who have been tossed to challenge that,” he said. “Obviously it would have been better if they had never had to deal with it in the first place.”

Vicuña said other lawsuits could provide more help to individual voters. Common Cause is currently suing several Texas counties that removed voters from their rolls based on the revamped SAVE system.

Other states using SAVE so far have flagged much smaller numbers of potential noncitizens registered. Louisiana said it identified about 400 potential noncitizen voters on its rolls (out of nearly 3 million registered voters) and found 83 who had voted in at least one election since the 1980s. In 2024, Georgia identified 20 potential noncitizen voters on its rolls (out of more than 8 million registered voters).

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said in a statement that he was disappointed with the judge’s ruling and said he was still proceeding with a new check of its voter rolls to ensure no noncitizens were on the lists.

A top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, recently referred more than 200 cases of potential noncitizen voters to the state and local prosecutors for potential prosecution.

Initially, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap said in February that his office had used SAVE to identify 137 potential noncitizens on the rolls and found 60 of those had voted in prior elections. That’s about 0.2% of the 60,000 voters it ran through the system, and a tiny fraction of the county’s total 2.5 million voters. Heap’s office and the state attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment on how the legal ruling might impact ongoing investigations.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock

2026-06-15T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

President Donald Trump is in a race against time.

Since returning to office last year, Trump has repeatedly tried to remake American elections, including by issuing two executive orders that would erect new federal rules and restrictions on voting and various aspects of elections. Voting rights advocates and a variety of states have filed lawsuits that have already frozen key tentpoles of Trump’s first executive order on voting and could do the same for the second. If Trump wants to see these measures impact this November’s elections, his administration has to move fast.

In recent days, the Trump administration has taken new steps to erect the architecture it would need to implement key pieces of the president’s most recent election executive order, which called in March for the Department of Homeland Security to create “State Citizenship Lists” of all U.S. citizens who are over 18.

In response to the order, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled plans to set up a special system by the end of this month — then revised its plans just days later, showing how quickly the administration is moving to try and put these measures in place.

The executive order also calls on the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new process where it could block voters from receiving mail-in ballots if they are not on a vetted list provided to the federal government 60 days before an election, and the agency has proposed new rules to do so. Many election officials say the move could cause chaos, and is beyond the president’s authority.

Setting aside the constitutional questions around the efforts, voting rights advocates say that it could be practically very difficult for the agencies involved to create a workable system before the November election.

“Elections are like a battleship, it’s not like you can turn them around on the fly,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA political science professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “It seems exceedingly unlikely that any of this will be in place by November.”

The administration’s court filings hint at some of the difficulties.

On Friday, June 5, the Trump administration filed a four-paragraph notice to a court in Boston overseeing a legal challenge to the March executive order. In that notice, the Department of Homeland Security said it was moving ahead with plans to allow states to check voter eligibility by submitting their entire voter lists to a federal database known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

It also said the department would create a portal that would allow state election officials to “securely access citizenship-related data” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Department of State — by June 30.

But three days later, this past Monday, the Trump administration changed plans and filed a new notice with the court, outlining a new memorandum rescinding the previously stated policies. Per the notice, that memo walks back some of the specifics of the earlier implementation plan, promising only to provide by June 30 “a mechanism for States to receive secure, state-focused citizenship-related information from each agency.”

The previously mentioned portal would come sometime later this year, the revised notice said, and the new memo also rescinded the proposal that would let states submit their voter rolls to SAVE because, the notice said, that approach wasn’t specifically called for in the executive order.

Some states have already used the system — which was previously used to verify immigrants’ eligibility for benefits — to check voter eligibility after the administration revamped the database and vigorously encouraged states to do so, but others have questioned the accuracy of the SAVE system and declined to use it.

The initial notice also said that the Homeland Security department “contemplates working with” the U.S. Postal Service to access its data on mail ballots and use it to “monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

In the second notice, the administration instead told the court the two agencies were having “preliminary conversations” on potential data-sharing, and decisions would be contingent on final legal and policy determinations.

Beyond the logistical challenges, the proposals are facing legal challenges that could block them from taking effect. A coalition of Democratic party committees and some nonprofit groups have challenged the Trump executive order as unconstitutional. And while a federal judge in Washington, D.C. declined to immediately halt major provisions in that case, a federal judge in Boston could still do so. That judge expressed concerns last month during a hearing on a separate case brought by Democratic officials from twenty-three states, the District of Columbia, and a different group of nonprofits, and is expected to rule soon.

John Davisson, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the latest Trump administration move “a five-alarm fire for the protection of privacy and voting rights” across the country.

“Building a citizenship registry is beyond the federal government’s power, illegal under the Privacy Act, impossible to construct without introducing catastrophic error, and guaranteed to cause untold numbers of perfectly legal voters to be denied their right to vote if implemented,” he said.

The Trump administration says its efforts are a way to integrate federal systems to help ensure there is no fraud in the country’s electoral system.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment. In April, Lauren Bis, a spokesperson, said SAVE “is a critical tool for state and local governments to safeguard the integrity of elections across the country.” The Trump administration has sued a majority of U.S. states in an effort to secure access to their voter registration databases.

Votebeat Brunch: Is your election rigged? Separating fact from fiction.

California’s primary election set off a new wave of unsubstantiated allegations — including from Trump — that the vote was rigged. To separate fact from fiction, Votebeat spoke to Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert in disinformation. DiResta served for five years as technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and co-led a nonpartisan Election Integrity Partnership that studied misinformation during the 2020 election. The interview was conducted in writing and has been lightly edited for clarity, brevity, and style.

Q: The California election has triggered a new flood of unsupported allegations that the vote is rigged. What advice do you have for voters trying to separate fact from fiction?

Many election rumors spread because they are emotionally compelling, not because they’re supported by facts. When people encounter a claim that an election was “rigged,” they should ask a few questions:

- What is the original source of the claim?

- Is there any evidence, or just screenshots, anecdotes, or speculation? “It just seems weird” isn’t evidence.

- Have election officials, courts, or independent observers said anything?

- Do multiple credible sources support the claim?

People should also be careful about treating isolated irregularities as proof of widespread fraud. Every election has some mistakes, and administrative errors. Those are not automatically evidence that they were manipulated. Officials will often explain what happened quickly, but you sometimes have to go check because their posts generally don’t go viral. A useful rule of thumb is: The stronger the claim, the stronger the evidence must be.

Q: What are some tools people can use to get reliable information amid a flood of misinformation?

A good starting point is official election information from state and local election offices, since they can provide direct information about procedures, vote counting, and certification, and they know the local rules better than anyone else. Fact checks are helpful as well. Keep in mind that getting answers takes time. Asking an AI for facts isn’t going to get you an immediate answer in most cases because it has to work with what’s out there, too. Asking Grok or another AI can help, but it’s sometimes dependent on how recent or specific the issue is. Be wary and double check, or check again later.

Q: Is there more state and federal officials should be doing to address election misinformation?

Election officials who communicate quickly and responsively about voting procedures, counting, audits, and certification tend to leave less room for rumors to thrive. Communicating in advance can help, too. And strengthening influencer disclosure rules would go a long way toward shifting incentives.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting

2026-05-29T23:25:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The U.S. Postal Service proposed new rules Friday that detail in part how the Trump administration intends to carry out its contested mail-ballot executive order — revealing a plan that, if it survives legal challenges, would create new barriers for mail voting and new burdens for election officials.

Under the proposal, all states would be required to send the federal government a list of all registered voters to which they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots in key federal elections. The proposal appears to give the postal service new power to block delivery of ballots to people that are not on the list and allow the agency to refuse delivery of ballots that do not meet new federal standards outlined in the proposed rule.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former Colorado election administrator, said that the proposal would create onerous new regulations that could be difficult and costly for local elections officials to follow, especially in rural counties which do not currently have the technology to produce the required barcodes. Such systems cost thousands of dollars.

Morrell said the rules represent an unnecessarily broad attempt to crack down on extremely rare examples of voter fraud.

“This proposal would fundamentally change the rules to address a problem that is extraordinarily rare,” she said. “This is adding significant complexity and new administrative burdens that can add additional costs with little-to-no evidence the current system is failing.”

Release of the proposed rules created widespread confusion among local elections officials unsure how they would work, and sparked broad condemnation from voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders who accused the Trump administration of trying to take unconstitutional steps to deny Americans their right to vote.

“Tens of millions of eligible voters could be prevented from voting by mail if states do not fully submit to this new federal mandate being rushed ahead of the 2026 election,” said U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California’s secretary of state. “Serious and consequential questions remain over how this new list will work with the Trump Administration’s ongoing illegal effort to create a national voter list.”

Friday’s proposed regulations, which require a 30-day comment period before moving forward, are the latest step by the Trump administration to overhaul election rules and impose unprecedented new federal oversight on the voting process.

Since returning to the White House last year, President Donald Trump has directed his administration to take sweeping new steps to alter an election system he has accused, without evidence, of cheating him out of the 2020 election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in January seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia as part of a probe of the 2020 election. He has issued two executive orders that attempt to assert broad presidential control over elections, though the Constitution gives authority over elections to the states and Congress. Both orders were quickly challenged in the courts, which froze major provisions of the first order, ruling the president exceeded his authority.

Release of the rules came one day after federal judge refused to block the most recent executive order on mail-in ballots because the Postal Service had not yet released its proposed new regulations. Another challenge to the order is pending in Boston, where a federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments June 2 in cases brought by voting-rights groups and a coalition of states.

Counties face steep compliance questions

Local election officials and experts said the proposal raised urgent operational questions about whether existing ballot envelopes comply with the new standards, whether counties and vendors can produce unique barcodes for outgoing and return ballots, and whether USPS could reject ballot mailings if voter data is missing, late, or mismatched.

“I don’t know how the states would potentially interpret what they need to do in order to comply, and what happens if the state doesn’t?” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the Election Center, which represents state and local election officials. “Does that mean the postal service will reject the ballots? I don’t think so. The postal service will deliver any mail provided to them so what happens if a state doesn’t do it?”

In addition, Patrick added, “I haven’t seen much here that is giving me much confidence this can be done by the fall without creating a lot of confusion and potential chaos.”

Patrick said many of the Postal Service’s proposed standards are best election-mail practices, many of which she worked on for years. But turning them into federal mandates could collide with state laws and leave local officials with no clear way — or funding — to comply.

“Some of these things are actually really good,” Patrick said, though election officials have been unable to adopt them in the past, and there’s no funding in the executive order to help.“Who is going to pay for it?”

Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state, said implementing the changes before the 2026 midterms would place another burden on election officials who are already underfunded and understaffed.

“Especially in situations like this, where there is no funding being provided and no time for election officials and voters to absorb the required changes, this means that voters will bear the brunt of a poorly planned, last minute attempt to upend electoral processes,” said Boockvar, a Democrat. “You can’t just snap your fingers and change how elections are run overnight.”

A technical rule with major implications

Among the most concerning pieces of the 20-page proposal, voting rights advocates and election officials said, is a new requirement that every ballot envelope — both the one sent to the voter and the one used to return the ballot — carry a unique Postal Service barcode.

Election officials would have to send those barcodes to USPS along with voters’ names and addresses, allowing the agency to check whether outbound ballot mailings match the state-submitted list before accepting them. The postal service said the new rules wouldn’t apply to primary elections or to military and overseas ballots, but critics said it could force some jurisdictions to redesign envelopes, update vendor contracts, and build new ballot-tracking systems before the next federal election in November.

That could be difficult. For example, Thad Hall, the election director in Pennsylvania’s Mercer County, said that while some of his outgoing mail envelopes have intelligent barcodes, not all do. Officials in other Pennsylvania counties have in the past said their vendors do not use intelligent barcodes.

Gideon Cohn-Postar, director of federal affairs at the Institute for Responsive Government, a nonpartisan think tank, characterized the proposal as a confusing attempt to comply with Trump’s recent executive order.

“The executive order they are trying to fulfill is incoherent in and of itself,” he said.

Cohn-Postar said the proposals could have the biggest impact on small jurisdictions that may not have the funding to comply. In a small jurisdiction of about 2,500 voters, ordering new envelopes costs about $10,000 — a significant expense that requires them to learn entirely new technology.

For those jurisdictions, he said, the proposal could be a “big change.”

“Right now, in the heat of the midterm election cycle, election officials should be given the space and resources to focus on critical work like improving cyber and physical security,” he said. “More bureaucracy only pulls them away from those mission-critical priorities.”

Correction, May 29: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quotation to Mercer County Election Director Thad Hall.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Federal judge refuses to block Trump executive order on mail voting — for now

2026-05-28T13:28:23+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This is a breaking story.

What happened? A federal court judge Thursday declined, for now, to halt two major provisions of President Donald Trump’s second executive order on elections, which would give the U.S. Postal Service sweeping new authority to regulate mail ballots and would force major changes to the administration of the midterm elections.

Judge Carl Nichols found that the U.S. Postal Service has not yet acted to implement the president’s order, and until it does, the nonprofit groups and Democratic Party committees that brought the legal challenge cannot show they had been harmed in a way that merited the court’s immediate intervention. He also declined to block a second provision that requires the U.S. Homeland Security Department to create lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state, saying it wasn’t yet clear the department would carry out the president’s order in a way that violated federal law.

But Nichols, a Trump appointee, signaled that once the agencies do act, the outcome in court could be different. “The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Nichols wrote. “Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur.”

What’s the dispute? Multiple nonprofit groups, Democratic Party committees, and states sued Trump, the U.S. Postal Service, and other federal agencies over the president’s March 31 executive order on elections, which give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail ballots. Some of those cases were consolidated before Nichols in federal court in Washington, D.C., and he is the first federal judge to address the order.

The plaintiffs argue the Constitution doesn’t give the president authority over elections.

The executive order works by requiring or asking for the creation of multiple lists of eligible citizens and voters who can use mail ballots, though it’s not always clear how the lists intersect. First, the order requires the U.S. Homeland Security Department to create lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state that, plaintiffs argue, cannot be assembled without violating federal privacy laws.

The order also says states may also create lists of voters and provide them to the U.S. Postal Service, which in turn would only be authorized to deliver ballots from people on a third list, to which states would be allowed “to routinely supplement and provide suggested modifications or amendments.”

Plaintiffs argued the DHS lists would inherently be inaccurate and unreliable, and that no federal law allows the U.S. Postal Service the ability to regulate mail-in voting. At a hearing before Nichols earlier this month, U.S. Justice Department lawyer Stephen M. Pezzi acknowledged that “no list is ever going to be perfect,” but said that states acting responsibly wouldn’t throw voters off the rolls just because they weren’t on the list provided by the federal government.

Pezzi argued that federal agencies have yet to take action on the order, and that their eventual actions could comply with federal law. Danielle Lang, a lawyer for the nonprofit watchdog group Campaign Legal Center who is representing some of the nonprofits, argued that the order’s timing, with primary elections underway, will cause chaos. And although the order does not require states to use the lists they receive from DHS, Lang said at least some will certainly feel pressure to do so.

The March 31 executive order is Trump’s second attempt to exercise oversight of federal elections. Federal courts blocked many provisions of Trump’s first executive order on elections.

What happens now?

The lawsuit remains pending before Nichols, and a separate case is pending in federal court in Boston. The executive order instructed the U.S. Postal Service to initiate a rulemaking on how it would carry out the order within 60 days of when it was issued, a deadline which falls at the end of May.

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s March 31 executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026

Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026

We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026

Texas is cross-referencing its list of potential noncitizen voters with driver’s license records

2026-05-28T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Update, May 29, 2026, 12:50 p.m.: This story has been updated to include a statement from the Texas Department of Public Safety received after publication.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office is now checking whether 2,724 registered voters it flagged as potential noncitizens may have already provided proof of citizenship to the Texas Department of Public Safety, elections division director Christina Adkins said during a meeting with county election administrators earlier this month. That check comes after county elections officials found the federal database used to generate the list flagged some voters who had already given citizenship documentation to DPS when they registered to vote.

Texas officials in October sent counties the list of potential noncitizens generated by checking the state’s voter roll of more than 18 million registered voters against a federal database used to verify citizenship. Soon after the state released the list, counties began to investigate the flagged registrants and mail notices asking them to provide documented proof of citizenship.

County election officials have since confirmed some of the flagged voters were citizens, though a total number was not immediately available. In addition, they found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through DPS, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file.

In Travis County, for example, voter registrar Celia Israel asked the state to check the registrants flagged as potential noncitizens in the county against DPS records. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office did so, and found that out of the 97 individuals flagged as potential noncitizens in the county, 11 had already provided proof of citizenship.

Adkins during the meeting said that Travis County officials were the only ones who had requested that the state conduct the check of the records through DPS, according to a recording of the Secretary of State Office’s meeting with county election officials obtained by Votebeat. Now, the state is conducting these checks for flagged voters statewide.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office had previously told Votebeat and the Texas Tribune that it did not initially check the registrants flagged as potential noncitizens against DPS’ records before sending the list to county election officials to investigate.

That decision prompted a March lawsuit from voting rights groups and some Texas voters who said the state should have done so. The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.

In the meantime, local election officials in some counties have already removed some flagged voters from the voter rolls after they did not respond to requests to provide proof of citizenship.

It’s not clear why the Texas Secretary of State’s Office is checking the list of potential noncitizens against DPS records now and how county election officials will be directed to respond to the findings. The Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment for this story.

Officials push for additional safeguards to use the SAVE database

The federal database state election officials used to identify potential noncitizens is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database. The Trump administration overhauled SAVE last year, making it free for states to use and easier to search, and it has urged election officials around the country to use it to search for potential noncitizens on their voter rolls.

Experts and election officials have raised concerns about the SAVE database’s accuracy and reliability, and advocacy groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the administration’s changes and how SAVE is being used.

According to the recording, Adkins said the state did not initially check the list of potential noncitizens identified by SAVE against DPS records because that agency already uses the SAVE database.

“Initially, we didn’t think that there would be any kind of substantial difference, but obviously, we have found that there are some discrepancies,” Adkins said in the meeting.

Adkins said the discrepancies affected a “small fraction” of the total list and could be a result of outdated information kept by the SAVE database or by DPS — for example, some of the individuals flagged by the SAVE database may have recently become naturalized citizens — or due to clerical errors.

“No dataset is going to be 100% perfect,” she told county officials. “That’s why we can’t cancel voters outright” without additional investigation.

Adkins said another reason the state didn’t check DPS records before sending the lists to counties in October is because DPS must manually check each record, which takes a long time, and would have left counties with less time to investigate ahead of the March 3 primary election. Federal law restricts election officials’ ability to conduct systematic voter list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election, meaning the window for counties to investigate ahead of the primary ended in early December.

“We wanted to get that data in your hands, where you could at least address some of the kind of low-hanging fruit, is the way I would say it,” Adkins said.

In an emailed statement after this story initially published, DPS officials said the agency is working with the Secretary of State’s Office to “review and provide information from the Driver License System as it relates to registered voters, and requests to verify voter citizenship status are being prioritized.”

During an interim House Elections Committee hearing earlier this month, state lawmakers discussed how the state can ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote. At that hearing, Travis County election officials told lawmakers the state’s move to cross-check the results from the SAVE database with DPS data should be the standard moving forward. Others told lawmakers to consider the amount of time and resources it takes election officials — in counties already strapped for funding — to investigate whether a registrant is a potential noncitizen.

Last year, Texas lawmakers proposed a bill that would require Texans to provide documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, but it failed to pass before the end of the legislative session. The bill was among the most sweeping proof-of-citizenship proposals introduced anywhere in the country, applying not only to new applicants for voter registration but also retroactively to 18.6 million voters already registered in the state.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

What are Democrats’ and Republicans’ election priorities if they win control of Michigan state government?

2026-05-27T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

It hasn’t been the most productive couple of years for election legislation in Michigan.

Democrats in control of the state Senate have introduced bills that would amend rules for signature gathering and move up the state’s primary election from August to May. Over in the House, the Republican majority has proposed requiring people registering to vote to prove their citizenship, banning ranked choice voting, and preventing foreign nationals from spending money on ballot measure campaigns.

Bills have occasionally been sent from one chamber to the other, but time and time again, they never again see the light of day. Only two election bills, both bipartisan efforts, have made it out of committee in a second chamber. None have been signed into law.

That’s not a huge surprise given that different parties run the two chambers, particularly given how contentious election policy has become. But it does make the November election — in which Michigan voters will select a new governor as well as an entirely new legislature — that much more important. State House seats in Michigan are up every two years, while state Senate seats, like the governorship, are up every four.

The potential that one party could win a trifecta — i.e., control of the Senate, House, and governorship — is enticing to legislators who want to see Michigan as the home base for their party’s election goals. Michigan Democrats last held a trifecta in 2024, while Republicans last had one in 2018.

Unsurprisingly, though, the two parties have very different visions for the state’s elections if they take it all this fall. Democrats want to bolster voting rights, while Republicans want to improve security in the state’s elections.

Here are some specific proposals that each party is focusing on.

Democrats want to expand voting rights in Michigan

Sen. Jeremy Moss, the Senate president pro tempore and a Democrat from Southfield, noted that Democrats in the state have already passed much of their elections agenda. Moss has been chair of the Senate Elections Committee since 2023, and in that time, he said Democrats have “achieved a lot.”

“One of the biggest stories” out of the 2023-24 session, when Democrats held their first trifecta in nearly 40 years, “was how much we improved elections here in the state of Michigan,” said Moss, who is retiring from the legislature this year to seek a U.S. House seat.

But there’s more work to be done, he said. If Democrats win the trifecta back, he expects to see the Michigan Voting Rights Act finally become law. The MVRA, which is made up of four bills, aims to fill in the gaps of the federal Voting Rights Act, which has been weakened by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent years. It was introduced last session but ultimately failed to make it through the chaotic final month of the session. Senators introduced it again earlier this month.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for governor, has supported the MVRA and called for its passage late last month after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais further eroded the federal version. That has left Democrats with what Sen. Darrin Camilleri, a Democrat from Trenton, called “an obligation to take action” during a hearing on the bills last week.

“Whether you’re an independent or Republican or Democrat, these bills are good for you,” Camilleri said. “They protect your vote and your voice no matter who you support.”

The bills, reintroduced this session as Senate Bills 961-964, passed out of committee last week in a 4-1 party-line vote, clearing the way for a vote by the full Senate. However, they are expected to languish in the Republican-controlled House.

Michigan Republicans are focused on preventing noncitizen voting

On the other hand, if Republicans win a trifecta, party leaders promise to focus on election security measures, especially a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

Rep. Rachelle Smit, speaker pro tempore of the Michigan House and a Republican from Martin, held a press conference last week slamming Senate Democrats for failing to take up Republicans’ election bills, including her own proposal to ban foreign nationals from spending money on ballot measure campaigns in the state.

She also criticized the MVRA, calling it “fear-mongering.”

“The most important thing that we could be doing to preserve and protect our voting rights is pass Representative [Jason] Woolford’s bill, which would be requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote,” Smit said.

Proof of citizenship has been a major priority for Republicans this session, beyond just Woolford’s bill. Rep. Bryan Posthumus, a Republican from Rockford, introduced a state constitutional amendment to require proof of citizenship when someone registers to vote, although that ultimately did not pass the House. It’s possible a proof-of-citizenship amendment will be directly on the ballot this fall, though, after a similar effort from Americans for Citizens Voting submitted more than 750,000 signatures to the Bureau of Elections earlier this year.

“Proof of citizenship is a critical one,” Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and GOP candidate for secretary of state, told Votebeat when sharing his own list of what he would like to see happen if Republicans win big this fall.

Secretary of state is not considered part of the trifecta, but if Forlini wins, he’ll be expected to work with the legislature to enact voting legislation. His wish list right now includes “accountability” in how absentee ballots are handled and improvements to the state’s campaign finance laws.

“I’d like to see more transparency across the board as it revolves around election integrity,” he said, pointing to some of his own efforts in Macomb County to improve transparency.

He suggested a stronger monitoring system for ballot drop boxes to verify who drops off ballots at them. State law already requires video monitoring, but Forlini said some videos have captured people dropping off a significant number of ballots, possibly in violation of the law (in Michigan, people can only return ballots on behalf of family or members of their household). Such a video came out in Hamtramck last summer, but Forlini said he was aware of videos in other communities as well, although he didn’t name them.

“These are things that need to be looked at,” he said. “It’s not voter suppression. You’re suppressing votes by allowing these things to happen.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Exclusive: Justin Heap refers alleged noncitizen voters to AG’s office after strongly worded letters

2026-05-22T21:32:41+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

After weeks of sparring with state prosecutors, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap referred potential noncitizens that he claims to have found on the county’s voter roll to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office on Friday.

His referral comes after the attorney general’s office suggested it could take legal action against Heap unless he handed over information about the voters, according to public records obtained by Votebeat.

Nicholas Klingerman, the chief counsel of the office’s criminal division, wrote in an April 2 letter to Heap that he was violating state law by failing to refer the alleged noncitizen voters for further investigation. On May 20, he sent another letter stressing those concerns and adding that Heap’s “current handling” of the voters’ registration status didn’t comply with state election law.

“At this point, your insistence that you are following the law is wrong at best and purposefully misleading at worst,” Klingerman wrote in his letter, adding that Heap must refer the voters to state prosecutors by the end of the week.

He said the Arizona Attorney General’s Office was prepared to “take all appropriate steps” to ensure that Heap “faithfully executed” state law.

Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, told Votebeat his office received the referral from Heap around 2 p.m. on May 22.

In an April 10 response to Klingerman, Heap defended his delay in referring the voters to state prosecutors and said he was following the law. Judy Keane, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, did not respond to a request for comment.

Heap used SAVE database to identify 207 alleged noncitizen voters

The correspondence came after Heap, a Republican who has expressed skepticism about the integrity of past elections, announced in February that his office had identified 137 potential noncitizens registered to vote while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of 61,681 voters impacted by a longstanding state record-keeping error. Of those 137, the recorder’s office said 60 had previously cast ballots.

But experts have long warned that the database that the office used to identify the voters — called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — is unreliable. Maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, it was revamped and expanded last year to be used as a mass voter verification tool. However, it has falsely flagged citizens as noncitizens in several states, raising questions about whether the number of noncitizens Heap announced could be inflated.

At the time, Heap said he would refer the voters to both Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican, for further investigation. In March, he sent information about 207 voters to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office — significantly more than the 137 voters that he had previously said he suspected were noncitizens. His office didn’t respond to questions about where the additional 70 voters came from.

Around the same time, Heap said that he intended to change the registration status of the voters. He wrote in a March 11 letter to Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, that he would move the voters to “not eligible status” and then send them notices informing them of the issue.

To regain their eligibility, affected voters would be required to prove their citizenship with a document such as a passport or birth certificate by 7 p.m. on Election Day. If, after the next regular general election, they have still not provided proof of citizenship, their registration may be canceled.

Prosecutor said Heap was using wrong process to handle potential noncitizen voters

In that March letter, Heap appeared to be using a process outlined in the state’s election procedures manual that applies to new registrants suspected of being noncitizens. He also cited that process in his response to Klingerman, saying he was following the law — not violating it.

“The recorder’s office has acted deliberately and in good faith to follow the process established by the legislature and reflected in the EPM,” Heap wrote in his April 10 letter. “That process is designed to protect both election integrity and the due process rights of affected voters. Premature referrals outside of that framework would undermine both.”

But in his letter this week, Klingerman told Heap that his interpretation of state election law was “incorrect” and that he should be following the requirements in a separate state law that lays out how to notify and remove potential noncitizens who are already on the voter rolls. That process requires the county recorder to send suspected noncitizens notices requesting that they prove their citizenship within 35 days.

If they don’t provide the necessary documents, the statute directs the county recorder to then cancel their registration and refer them to county and state prosecutors for further investigation.

“Statute clearly mandates cancellation and criminal referrals after 35 days of discovering a noncitizen is registered to vote,” Klingerman wrote. “You cannot place ‘not eligible’ holds on these registered voters and fail to issue criminal referrals.”

Klingerman’s arguments echoed those of several election experts and lawyers who raised questions about Heap’s planned process back in March. Heap’s office has not responded to repeated inquiries from Votebeat about the alleged noncitizen voters or its plans for them.

Klingerman added that he was especially concerned that Heap was withholding information regarding the 60 potential noncitizens that the recorder’s office claimed had voted in prior elections.

“Our elections are far too important for you to refuse to provide the names of suspected noncitizen voters,” he wrote.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

New voting requirements? Troops at the polls? We asked 37 election experts what could disrupt the 2026 elections.

2026-04-17T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

There are always unanswered questions heading into any election. But usually those questions are more along the lines of “who’s going to win?” and less “will the federal government interfere with the election?”

But here in 2026, President Donald Trump’s broadsides against the legitimacy of U.S. elections and efforts to overhaul election laws have generated lots of uncertainty — and anxiety — about whether this will be a normal election year. Election officials and voters alike are left to wonder whether there will be new requirements for voters, physical interventions at the polls, or attempts to overturn results after the fact.

Despite seemingly endless speculation, no one knows for sure how likely any of these things is. But to get the most well-informed assessments, we turned to the people who spend the most time thinking about elections.

We asked 37 experts in the field of election administration — academics, lawyers, former election officials, etc. — to answer 26 questions about the likelihood of various scenarios coming to pass in the 2026 midterms.

Their answers reflect a general sense of cautious optimism about the most dire scenarios — such as an election getting overturned — and skepticism that the federal government will successfully change voting rules. But they also still believe the election will face serious challenges, including federal agents potentially showing up at polling places.

Election experts say new federal laws are unlikely, but split on state laws and court intervention

Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has pushed aggressively for the federal government to set more rules around how elections are run, promoting legislation that would require registering voters to prove their citizenship with documentation and issuing two election-related executive orders. (The first executive order has largely been blocked in court, though the administration has appealed. The second is currently under litigation, and the conventional wisdom is that it will be halted as well.)

However, experts were skeptical that these measures would ever take effect. Thirty-four of our 37 respondents said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require new registrants to prove their citizenship for the midterms, and 32 said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require all voters to show an ID or restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots. (They provided their answers before Trump issued his second executive order, which sought to regulate mail voting through the U.S. Postal Service.)

Likewise, virtually all respondents thought it was unlikely that the federal government would restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting or limit or eliminate the use of voting machines to tally ballots in the midterms.

However, experts were more open to the possibility that some of these policies could take effect in individual states. Although none thought it was likely that a significant number of states would limit or eliminate the use of voting machines, about a quarter of respondents thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots in the midterms. About one-third thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would strengthen their voter ID requirements or restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting.

Even more respondents, 15 of the 37, thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would pass proof-of-citizenship requirements before the election — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that such laws were working their way through several state legislatures at the time. Those laws have since passed in Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah, although Florida’s does not take effect until 2027 and Mississippi’s is limited in scope.

Overall, though, most experts didn’t expect states to significantly change their election laws this year. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, pointed out that many states have part-time legislatures that won’t be in session between now and the election. “I expect new legislation in the months ahead that might affect the 2026 election to be negligible,” Muller said.

If there are going to be major election-law changes before the midterms, experts expect them to come from the third branch of government: the judiciary. Seventeen experts said it was at least somewhat likely that pre-election court rulings would significantly alter election rules shortly before the midterms, although 19 still said that was unlikely.

In follow-up interviews, those who thought this was likely said that they were keeping an eye both on currently pending cases — such as a U.S. Supreme Court case that could require all mail ballots to arrive by Election Day — and those that have not yet been filed. That said, a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year will probably encourage litigants to bring any cases challenging election rules well before the election, making last-minute rule changes less likely.

Experts expect federal agents to disrupt the 2026 election

For many election officials and voting advocates, the nightmare scenario for the 2026 midterms is if federal agents, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, attempt to disrupt voting or the counting of ballots. It’s already illegal for armed troops to visit voting locations, and the Trump administration has repeatedly said that it will not send ICE agents to polling places this year. However, new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has declined to absolutely rule it out, and a majority of the experts we surveyed expected something like this to happen.

Twenty-seven of the 37 respondents said it was at least somewhat likely that the federal government would deploy some form of military or law enforcement at or near polling places in the midterms. A slight majority said it was likely that Trump would ask the National Guard or federal agents to seize voting equipment during the election, and over three-quarters said it was likely that Trump would ask them to seize voting equipment after the election. (It’s worth noting that respondents gave these answers just a few weeks after the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump said that he regretted not asking the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.)

Multiple respondents told Votebeat that the seizure of voting equipment was more likely after the election because the election results will be known at that time. “Before the election, no one will know where seizing equipment or ballots could shift pivotal races,” said Christopher Mann, the research director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “After the election, a bad actor will have a better picture of where seizing voting equipment or ballots can shift the overall outcome.”

Twenty-eight experts said it was at least somewhat likely that there would be physical threats to voters or polling places in the midterms, including 11 who said it was very likely. (They were perhaps recalling 2024, when a string of bomb threats forced some polling places to close temporarily, though election officials were able to minimize disruptions to voting.) However, experts were divided on whether these threats would deter people from voting. Twenty-one experts said it was unlikely that a significant number of voters would decide not to vote because of threats or physical intimidation, while 16 said that was likely.

Notably, experts were not very confident about their predictions about armed intervention in the midterms. Some also pointed out that, even if it’s likely that Trump might order federal agents to interfere in the election, that doesn’t mean they will succeed. “Election officials, courts, and other state and local officials are going to stop any attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots,” Mann predicted.

And some experts emphasized that even if there are incidents at specific polling places, they expect the election overall to run smoothly. “I’m an optimist, which probably led to many of my answers,” admitted Jeff Greenburg, a retired election official in Pennsylvania and a senior adviser at the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group. But Greenburg said he doesn’t expect that physical threats to voting “will significantly impact elections nationwide. I have faith and trust in our election officials, as well as the rule of law, and believe in the end every vote cast will be counted.”

Losers may claim fraud, but it’s unlikely an election gets overturned

Election experts of all stripes are confident that U.S. elections are secure. All 37 respondents said it was unlikely that a significant number of ineligible voters would cast ballots in the midterms, including 35 who said it was not at all likely. Experts also unanimously said that it was unlikely that voter fraud would influence the outcome of a 2026 congressional race.

However, that isn’t expected to stop candidates from questioning the election results. Almost three-quarters of experts thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of losing candidates would claim fraud influenced the outcome of the election. All 37 thought it was likely that at least one congressional or statewide election would be legally challenged, with 30 calling it very likely.

At the same time, though, most experts don’t expect those challenges to succeed. Thirty-one of the 37 respondents thought it was unlikely that any congressional or statewide elections would be successfully overturned.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Maricopa County recorder asks prosecutors to investigate 207 alleged noncitizen voters

2026-03-24T23:12:43+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap has formally referred potential noncitizen voters identified by an error-prone federal database to local prosecutors for further investigation ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said in a statement that Heap referred a total of 207 individuals for review — significantly more than the 137 voters Heap had previously announced he suspected were noncitizens. It said those referrals came in two batches — 137 voters were referred last week, and another 70 people were added on Monday.

Judy Keane, a spokeswoman for Heap, did not respond to a question about why he referred an additional 70 voters.

Prosecutors added that the probe was in “very early stages.”

“In order to protect the integrity of the investigation, we will not comment further,” their statement read. “When more information is available for release, we will make that public.”

The move comes more than a month after Heap’s office announced it was referring the 137 potential noncitizen voters to both the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. It’s unclear why Heap waited until last week to refer the cases; his office has not responded to multiple requests for comment on its handling of the alleged noncitizen voters in recent weeks. As of Monday, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office said it had yet to receive any referrals from Heap.

Heap, a Republican who has expressed skepticism about the integrity of past elections, identified the 137 potential noncitizen voters while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of 61,681 voters impacted by a longstanding state record-keeping error. Of those 137, Heap’s office said 60 had previously cast ballots.

But experts have long warned that the database that the office used to identify the voters — called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — is unreliable. Maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, it was revamped and expanded last year to be used as a mass voter verification tool. However, it has produced false positives in several states, including Texas, raising questions about whether the number of noncitizens Heap announced could be inflated.

Heap has also said that he intends to change the registration status of the voters. He wrote in a March 11 letter to Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, that he will move the voters to “not eligible status” pending receipt of documents proving their citizenship.

But he appears to be using a process outlined in the state’s election rulebook that applies to new registrants suspected of being noncitizens, rather than following requirements in a state law that lays out how to notify and remove potential noncitizens who are already on the voter rolls.

Several election experts and lawyers said his use of that process is questionable and may not meet legal requirements for notifying voters.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

As the SAVE America Act stalls in the Senate, Florida passes its own version

2026-03-23T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

A signature piece of voting legislation championed by President Donald Trump may not have much of a future in the U.S. Senate, but in Florida, the future is here.

Earlier this month, Republican lawmakers in Trump’s home state approved a sweeping overhaul of the state’s voter registration system, one that mirrors the core idea behind the federal SAVE America Act: requiring proof of citizenship to get on the rolls. The details differ — the Florida bill, for instance, would not take effect until after the midterms — but the architecture is the same. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the bill into law any day now.

In states like Florida, policies like this one that are on the GOP’s wish list can move quickly. Republicans face little meaningful Democratic opposition, and the bill advanced with relatively little resistance — a stark contrast to Washington, where things are far messier.

The U.S. Senate began debate March 17 on the SAVE America Act, the next step in a high-profile fight not just between Republicans and Democrats, but within the GOP itself. Some Republicans want to change Senate filibuster rules to force the bill through. Others, including party leaders, are loath to blow up the way the Senate does business — and say the votes simply aren’t there to do so anyway.

That divide is showing up in quieter ways, too. Some Republican lawmakers have raised concerns about how the proposal could affect absentee and mail voting — exposing a disconnect between the party’s national push and how voting actually works in many GOP-led states.

As of yet, the debate hasn’t gotten very far — it took until Saturday, the fifth day of debate, for the first vote to be held on any motions or amendments to the bill. That amendment, to bar transgender athletes from playing women’s sports, failed to receive the necessary 60 votes. The bill itself remains under consideration, but its ultimate fate appears sealed.

Meanwhile, in Florida, lawmakers aren’t waiting on Washington. They’re largely in lockstep, drawing on lessons from other states’ past attempts to require proof of citizenship and focusing on how to build a version of the policy that can withstand legal challenges.

Arizona didn’t have that roadmap. When voters there approved a ballot measure in 2004 that required registering voters to prove their citizenship, the state moved to reject people who used the federal voter registration form without providing their documents, triggering a legal challenge. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Arizona had to accept the federal form, which requires only an oath of citizenship — at least for federal elections.

But Arizona kept its proof-of-citizenship requirement for state elections, resulting in a split system. Voters who have provided citizenship documentation can cast ballots in all races; others can vote only in federal contests, a system that has proven messy for both administrators and voters.

Florida is trying to avoid that outcome. Instead of rejecting applicants outright, Florida’s proposal would build a verification layer behind the scenes, cross-checking new registrants against driver’s license records and other databases to confirm citizenship.

Voters who can’t be verified aren’t necessarily denied registration, but they can be flagged and required to take extra steps — casting a provisional ballot or providing documents later. On paper, the state is still accepting the federal form. In practice, eligibility may hinge on whether the state can independently confirm your citizenship. If the law is challenged — and it likely will be — courts will have to decide whether that distinction holds.

A ruling against Florida could push the state toward the same outcome as Arizona, where some voters are effectively eligible only for federal races. But if the approach is upheld, it could offer a blueprint for other states to require proof of citizenship without directly violating federal law.

Lawmakers in several other Republican-led states are moving quickly on similar proposals. South Dakota and Utah have advanced their own proof-of-citizenship policies, while similar measures are moving through the legislative process in Mississippi and Iowa.

As the federal SAVE America Act would, these state-level proof-of-citizenship requirements would create significant hurdles for people looking to register to vote; millions of American citizens lack ready access to proof of citizenship. But it’s not at all clear Republicans would benefit from this policy push. Some categories of voters who might have the hardest time producing documentation that proves their citizenship overlap heavily with the GOP base.

Even conservative analysts and Republican officials have acknowledged the risk: stricter documentation rules could hit rural and older voters especially hard, forcing them to navigate new bureaucratic hurdles or risk having their ballots rejected.

But Trump, for his part, has shown little interest in the specifics.

He has said he won’t sign any more major legislation unless it includes the SAVE America Act — a position that doesn’t reflect the basic math of the Senate, where the votes to pass it simply are not there. He also said he won’t endorse lawmakers who vote against the bill.

Whether that’s a negotiating tactic or a genuine red line is still unclear, but it’s already threatening to snarl legislation far beyond election policy. A bipartisan housing bill aimed at addressing affordability is now at risk, despite drawing broad support, as lawmakers weigh whether anything can move without triggering a veto threat.

And on social media, Trump has continued to frame the issue in stark — and often misleading — terms, insisting that widespread noncitizen voting is a major threat to U.S. elections.

“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” he wrote on Truth Social in early March, encouraging Republicans to “fight” for the SAVE America Act. “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.”

It’s a narrative lawmakers in states like Florida are already writing into law — whether Congress ever acts on it or not.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Why a recorder’s plan to change 137 voters’ registration status in a key election battleground raises legal questions

2026-03-16T20:33:39+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap said he plans to soon refer suspected noncitizen voters identified via a federal system to law enforcement for prosecution and change their registration status, but election lawyers and experts questioned whether his office is following the correct legal process.

Heap, a Republican, said during a live interview on Friday with KTAR News that he would send the referrals “probably by the beginning of next week.”

He also plans to move the voters to “not eligible” status pending receipt of documents proving their citizenship, per a letter he sent on March 11 to Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. The document was obtained by Votebeat via a public records request.

His remarks came a month after his office said in a press release that it had identified 137 noncitizens on the county’s voter rolls while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of 61,681 voters impacted by a longstanding state record-keeping error. In that release, his office had said it would refer the voters to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

Heap’s office ran the voters’ information through a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that last year was overhauled by President Donald Trump’s administration, which has encouraged election officials to use it to check voter citizenship.

But experts have raised questions about the accuracy and reliability of the revamped database, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE. It has produced false positives in several states, including Texas, raising questions about whether the number of noncitizens Heap announced could be inflated.

In addition, Heap appears to be using a process outlined in the state’s election rulebook that applies to new registrants suspected of being noncitizens, rather than following requirements in a state law that lays out how to notify and remove potential noncitizens who are already on the voter rolls.

Several election experts and lawyers told Votebeat that Heap’s planned process is questionable, and may not meet legal requirements for notifying voters.

“He hasn’t notified them appropriately under the statute,” said Gina Swoboda, a former election official, previous chair of the Arizona GOP, and a current Republican candidate for secretary of state. “He cannot do this.”

Bo Dul, a former state election official and lawyer who previously worked under Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and now specializes in election litigation at the law firm of Coppersmith Brockelman, said it seemed as if Heap was “confusing the procedures” for handling potential noncitizen registrants versus already-registered voters.

Heap’s office has not responded to eight requests for comment from Votebeat since Feb. 13 on its handling of the potential noncitizen voters.

But Heap wrote in his letter to Fontes that his office “remains confident in the procedures we have followed and in the administrative decisions made in this matter.”

“The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office is committed to upholding the highest standards of election administration, ensuring that voter registration records are accurate, and maintaining the integrity and public trust that Arizona voters expect from their election officials,” he wrote.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for Fontes, said Heap’s initial statement “significantly overstated the seriousness of the issue of ineligible voters,” but that state election officials are “absolutely confident that his staff will continue to follow the law when beginning the statutory process of correcting the voter’s record.”

She did not immediately respond to a follow-up request to explain how Heap’s planned process complied with the law.

Heap appears to be using process for new registrants flagged by the SAVE system

In his letter to Fontes, Heap said he has not yet cancelled any of the voter registrations he referenced in his press release, but the flagged voters “will be placed into a ‘not eligible’ status pending resolution of the citizenship documentation requirement.”

He appears to be following a process laid out in the state’s elections procedures manual for handling new applicants for voter registration who are flagged as noncitizens by the SAVE system.

That database was initially designed in the 1980s to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. In Arizona, election officials have sometimes used it to verify a registrant’s citizenship, but its use was limited because it long required specific identification numbers that local election officials didn’t have for most voters. State law mandates that county recorders “use all available resources to verify the citizenship status” of those registering to vote without providing a passport, birth certificate, or similar document.

The manual instructs recorders on what to do if a voter registration applicant is flagged as a potential noncitizen in SAVE. They are to register the voter with “not eligible” status, and then send a letter to the registrant within 10 business days to inform them of the issue.

To vote, the registrant must provide documentary proof of citizenship by 7 p.m. on Election Day. If, after the next regular general election, the voter has still not provided proof of citizenship, their registration may be canceled.

But last year, the Trump administration revamped the SAVE system to add data on U.S.-born citizens and allow states to upload thousands of names to it at once — as Heap’s office did while trying to confirm the citizenship status of the tens of thousands of Maricopa County voters affected by the state’s error.

Through no fault of their own, those voters had been erroneously marked in the state’s system as having provided documented proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. In reality, it is unclear whether they did so. Maricopa County officials flagged the problem in September 2024, and the state’s top court later ruled that the voters would be allowed to vote a full ballot in the general election. All were longtime residents of the state and many had been registered to vote for years. The largest group of affected voters were Republicans.

Lawyers, experts say recorders must send notice, then cancel registration of suspected noncitizen voters, per state law

Dul, of Coppersmith Brockelman, said Heap is using the wrong process.

“If somebody is already registered, no matter what the reason is to cancel them, to take them off the voter rolls, you have to follow the statutory process for canceling a voter registration,” she said.

The process outlined in state law requires the county recorder to send suspected noncitizens notices requesting documented proof of their citizenship status, and allow them 35 days to respond. If they don’t provide the necessary documents, the statute directs the county recorder to then cancel their registration and refer them to county and state prosecutors for further investigation.

Heap said in his letter to Fontes that the voters whose status he is preparing to change — along with all of the others impacted by the state error — were sent an initial notice requesting proof of citizenship, an apparent reference to mailings by his office last year.

The first version of the notice sent by his office last year was incorrect, setting off widespread confusion, and affected voters were later mailed a second one, with an added explanation in bold at the top explaining that the initial mailing was a mistake.

That second notice advised the voters that they had been impacted by the state error, and requested that they provide documents proving their citizenship. It said voters who did not provide a passport, birth certificate, or similar document would be moved to “federal-only” status, meaning that they would only be eligible to vote in federal contests, such as presidential and congressional races. Under state law, voters must prove their citizenship to vote in local and state elections.

It did not say that voters could see their registration status shift to ‘not eligible,’ nor that their registration could be canceled.

There is no evidence that Heap has yet sent affected voters any additional notices, though his office did not respond to multiple requests for comment seeking to confirm that. Following his office’s Feb. 13 press release, Votebeat requested copies of any notice sent by his office to suspected noncitizen voters. In a response on Feb. 23, records custodians told Votebeat that no such documents existed.

Since then, Votebeat has filed several additional records requests for any notices sent by his office. Heap’s office recently denied those requests, citing an exemption in state records law called “best interest of the state,” which allows officials to withhold public documents in certain circumstances when disclosure could cause irreparable harm to government functions or the public.

Specifically, the office said that disclosing the records could interfere with “ important law enforcement activities” — even though Heap said Friday that his office has yet to refer the voters to law enforcement.

Heap also didn’t reference additional notices in his letter to Fontes. Instead, he said the voters would “receive a formal notice” after they were moved to “not eligible” status.

Swoboda said the letters that Heap’s office sent to voters in June “does not in any way count as a notification.” Dul agreed, saying it was “not a sufficient cancellation notice.”

“‘We have reason to believe that you are, in fact, not a citizen, based on our search of ‘x’ database, and you have ‘x’ amount of days to provide documentary proof of citizenship or you shall be canceled,” Swoboda said. “That’s the notice that he has to send.”

Tom Collins, a former assistant attorney general and executive director of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, which is nonpartisan, said government lawyers regularly argue in court that notices sent by public agencies were sufficient even if they didn’t check all of the boxes that statute requires. Still, he said attorneys should advise government officials to “give the notice the statute called for.”

“My advice, in my position, would be to say, ‘No, we ought to send them the correct notice,” he said.

Swoboda said that Heap has “no business canceling anybody,” reiterating that she did not believe he was following proper procedures.

“They’re going to sue the shit out of him,” she said.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Michigan warns clerks against using jury pools to hunt for noncitizen voters

2026-03-12T21:44:38+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini has started what he calls “a movement” to compare jury duty questionnaires — specifically the forms where people claim they are not U.S. citizens and therefore ineligible to serve — with voter rolls. The Michigan Department of State is urging caution.

MDOS sent a memo to election officials statewide on Thursday advising them of the potential pitfalls of comparing jury lists to the Qualified Voter File. A copy of the memo, obtained by Votebeat, warns that without collaboration with legal counsel and state election officials, missteps in the process could wrongly strip eligible voters of their registration or expose them to scrutiny.

“It is critical that election officials proceed carefully before cancelling or changing voters’ status in QVF to ensure that U.S. citizens have the opportunity to confirm their eligibility,” the office warns. Following these steps ensures eligible voters “do not have their registrations cancelled, and they are not otherwise accused of improper conduct or subject to undue criminal investigation.”

Comparing the jury pools — and the people who self-select out by claiming a lack of citizenship — with the voter rolls can be a fraught way to find noncitizens. But Forlini says it doesn’t need to be hard.

Forlini began his mission earlier this year, when he announced that he had identified hundreds of people who had sought to be excused from jury duty in Macomb County by saying they weren’t citizens. Of those 230 people, he found 15 that were also on the voter rolls.

Three of those people had also voted in the county, his office found. The Michigan Department of State, upon investigating Forlini’s claim, found that one person had cast a ballot in 2018 despite not being a citizen. Another was a citizen, while the third was under review. State officials also confirmed that some of the other people Forlini’s office had flagged as potential noncitizens based on the jury lists were in fact U.S. citizens after all.

It’s led to a messy fight between the Macomb County Clerk and the Department of State. Forlini has more recently said that of more than 600 people who reported a lack of citizenship in Macomb County in 2025, 18 were at some point registered to vote.

“Do I not, as the county clerk, have a responsibility … of at least looking back and forth to see if there is some similarities?” he told Votebeat on Thursday, adding that he had heard from other clerks who had started reviewing their own voter rolls in the same way. “The system is flawed.”

At least one other clerk has contacted the Department of State about using the jury lists and other databases to check registrations, department spokesperson Angela Benander said Thursday. The Bureau of Elections has also heard “indirectly of one or two others” exploring the idea, Benander said.

Forlini said it should be easy to separate noncitizens in the jury pool lists shared between MDOS and the counties. The Department of State says it isn’t that simple.

When the state sends counties lists of people for jury duty, it is required to include all county residents with driver’s licenses or state IDs — not just citizens. That means that sometimes, the list will include people who aren’t citizens — as well as people who weren’t at the time of registering for an ID but have since naturalized and may or may not have updated their citizenship statuses with the state.

“People often don’t update their citizenship status until they renew their driver’s license, “which may be years later,” the memo says. If the department tried to remove everyone listed as a noncitizen from the driver file, it would also exclude thousands of people who have since become U.S. citizens.

That would mean that “a large number of Michigan citizens who are legally obligated to report for jury service” wouldn’t be called, it continues.

Comparing two databases also comes with practical challenges. While MDOS controls both the Qualified Voter File and the driver file (known as CARS), they are administered by separate divisions within the department, the memo says.

Plus, someone might have a similar name but be a different person, someone might have filled out a form incorrectly, or someone may have falsely claimed noncitizenship to avoid jury duty.

In other jurisdictions around the country, efforts to cross-check jury lists or SAVE, a federal citizenship database, to identify noncitizens has resulted in U.S. citizens being wrongly flagged or even removed from voter rolls.

Dealing with citizenship can be “more tricky” than something like whether a voter has moved, said Marc Meredith, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on election administration.

Citizenship changes regularly — roughly 17,000 people become citizens in Michigan each year, the memo notes. Each day that passes after a given list was produced is another day someone may have gained citizenship, Meredith said. Someone on the voter rolls who isn’t a citizen is a concern, he said, but so is wrongfully removing eligible voters.

He said both scenarios are genuine threats, and the debate ultimately hinges on how people weigh the tradeoff. Conversations also polarize quickly.

“You’ll hear people say that we should do everything to avoid a single case [of noncitizen voting], and you’ll hear that one person prevented from voting is too many,” he said. “Most people, I think, would believe the truth falls somewhere in between.”

Noncitizen voting is already illegal and extremely rare. A statewide review last year identified 16 potential noncitizens who may have voted in the 2024 election, Michigan officials said at the time. But the MDOS memo also noted that roughly half of those initially flagged for review were in fact citizens, warning that without the additional review steps the state undertook, “U.S. citizens could have been referred for prosecution.”

The final number — representing a tiny fraction of the more than 5.7 million votes cast in the general election that year — mirrors what has been found by similar reviews in other states. A review in Georgia found 20 noncitizens among its 8.2 million registered voters in 2024.

Even so, the debate around noncitizen voting remains politically potent in Michigan and nationally. Organizers in Michigan said they submitted 750,000 signatures earlier this month for a proposal that would ask voters this fall to amend the state constitution to require would-be voters to show proof of citizenship upon registering. It would also require current voters to do so if the state can’t independently verify their status.

Nationally, President Donald Trump has touted the SAVE America Act, a controversial elections bill that would introduce many of the same provisions federally — going so far as to say he won’t sign any other bills until it passes.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Trump’s call to heavily restrict mail ballots draws a lukewarm response

2026-03-02T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

When President Donald Trump called on Congress to pass a bill mandating voter ID and proof of citizenship during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, it was one of many moments that prompted Republican lawmakers to stand and applaud.

But when he followed that up with “no more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military, or travel — none,” the applause was less vigorous. Some of those standing and applauding sat down.

Trump’s latest broadside against mail ballots (it’s far from the first one) is interesting given that the SAVE America Act, the bill Trump specifically called on Congress to pass, wouldn’t institute the limits on mail voting that Trump called for. Despite that, Trump has repeatedly suggested that it would.

Polls have found bipartisan support for the bill’s voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements. But it’s clear there’s markedly less support for restricting the use of mail ballots, even from many Republican politicians. “Utah has an exemplary mail-in voting system” that is “administered very well and is vital for our rural communities,” Rep. Blake Moore, a Utah Republican, told the Deseret News this week. A focus group conducted during the speech found that independent voters didn’t like Trump’s call for mail ballot restrictions, either.

The president has a long history of railing against the use of mail ballots (even though he’s voted by mail himself) and suggesting without evidence that Democrats use them to cheat in elections. But if he were to get his way, it would force millions of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — to find a new way to vote. In 2024, nearly 47 million Americans cast mail ballots that were ultimately counted, according to data tracked by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. And multiple studies have found mail voting doesn’t benefit one party over the other.

Another major GOP elections bill, the Make Elections Great Again Act, does have provisions to limit mail voting — but even it wouldn’t go as far as Trump is proposing. That bill would ban the counting of mail ballots received after Election Day (that’s also at issue in an upcoming Supreme Court case), prohibit states from mailing ballots to voters who hadn’t specifically requested them, and place new limits on who is permitted to return a voter’s ballot on their behalf. The bill has yet to pass either chamber of Congress.

The SAVE America Act, by contrast, has already passed the House. On Tuesday night, Trump increased what has been his steady pressure on the U.S. Senate to act. “Congress should unite and enact this common-sense, country-saving legislation right now, and it should be before anything else happens,” he said.

Nearly all Democrats have opposed the SAVE America Act, arguing the new requirements, especially for proof of citizenship, will disenfranchise voters. Trump, though, without offering evidence, said Democrats oppose the bill because “they want to cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat and we’re going to stop it.”

Then, seeming to directly address Senate Majority Leader John Thune, he added, “We have to stop it, John.”

But it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate, and Republicans have just a 53-47 majority in the chamber. Proponents of the SAVE America Act have called on Thune to change the filibuster process for the bill from an on-paper hold to a literal talking filibuster, requiring Democrats to hold the floor and speak continuously in order to block a vote on it. However, that course of action could consume weeks of Senate floor time, and, this week, Thune said that wasn’t happening either.

It isn’t clear what happens next. Many people in Trump’s orbit seem determined to overhaul U.S. elections by whatever means necessary, and the president himself has suggested that if Congress fails to codify the election changes he’s called for, he’ll put them in place through an executive order.

Most legal experts, though, say the president has no legal authority over elections, and federal courts have largely blocked key provisions of his previous executive order on elections, including those to tighten proof-of-citizenship requirements. Trump suggested in a recent social media post that his next legal argument would be “irrefutable,” though he didn’t provide any details. There has, however, been speculation for months that he will in some way invoke emergency powers based on claims of foreign interference in U.S. elections.

Either way, preparations for the 2026 midterm elections are well underway, and primaries begin Tuesday. Voters, it turns out, have been using mail ballots for weeks already.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

ICE won’t be at polling places in 2026 election, Trump administration official says

2026-02-26T14:03:14+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not be stationed at polling places for the 2026 elections, an official from the Department of Homeland Security told election officials in a virtual meeting on Wednesday.

“Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation,” said Heather Honey, the deputy assistant secretary of homeland security for election integrity, in response to a question from California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, according to five people who listened to the call and confirmed her comments to Votebeat. “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations for this election.”

It’s the most definitive statement yet from President Donald Trump’s administration on a question that has loomed large over the 2026 midterms. As ICE has ramped up immigration enforcement with highly visible operations in cities like Minneapolis, election officials and voting-rights advocates have voiced concern that ICE or other federal agents could attempt to interfere with the voting process on Election Day — particularly after Trump said he regretted not deploying the National Guard in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In November, a White House spokesperson called concerns over armed agents at polling places “baseless conspiracy theories and Democrat talking points” but didn’t explicitly rule it out. Earlier this month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations,” but said she couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t happen.

Federal law makes it illegal to station “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” Even so, some Republicans have continued to push the idea.

In a recent interview with CNBC, U.S. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri questioned why ICE should be banned from polling places. On his podcast, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called for ICE to “surround the polls come November.” And Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman introduced a bill that would require federal immigration agents at every voting location in the state, although the proposal ultimately went nowhere.

Honey’s statement, however, may not placate everyone worried about federal interference at the polls. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told Votebeat after the call that he was not inclined to take Honey at her word. “It’s too bad that they used an election denier without any integrity to send that message,” he said, referring to Honey’s previous role as a prominent activist in the movement to question the 2020 election results. “We can’t guarantee that what she said was true,” Fontes said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Honey’s statements on the virtual meeting or Fontes’ remarks. Honey has previously defended her prior work.

Also in the meeting on Wednesday, Honey said that the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database had helped states identify more than 300,000 dead people and 25,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, people on the call said.

The Department of Homeland Security last year overhauled the SAVE database, which was originally designed to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, to turn it into a voter-verification tool. However, the new version of the tool has produced many false positives, and election officials in Texas found that it had flagged some people as noncitizens even though they had already provided proof of their citizenship.

Honey also encouraged states to use hand-marked paper ballots whenever possible, people on the call said, though she said ballot-marking devices should be available for voters who need them. Trump has made unfounded claims that voting machines manipulated the results of the 2020 election and called on states to use exclusively paper ballots. According to Verified Voting, nearly 70% of registered voters already live in a jurisdiction that uses hand-marked paper ballots, and nearly every jurisdiction uses paper ballots in some form.

Otherwise, despite speculation leading up to the meeting, the call on Wednesday was a fairly standard gathering between state election officials and federal agencies whose work is relevant to elections. In addition to Honey, the call included representatives from the FBI, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which organized it.

“Today’s virtual meeting with our federal partners resembled previous ones the Secretaries of State have had with them, during both the Trump and Biden administrations,” Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said in a statement. He said the federal representatives “reminded us of the resources they make available to help us election officials do our job” and “reaffirmed state officials’ primary role in the election process.”

Carrie Levine and Sasha Hupka contributed reporting.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Maricopa County recorder’s claim of 137 noncitizen voters may be too high

2026-02-19T23:54:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Update, Feb. 19: The Arizona Attorney General’s Office and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office told Votebeat on Thursday that Recorder Justin Heap’s office had not yet referred any alleged noncitizen voters to them for investigation, contradicting Heap’s announcement. Judy Keane, a spokesperson for Heap, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap claimed last week that his office had identified 137 noncitizens on the county’s voter rolls — but that number may be inflated, as the database he used to arrive at it has a history of inaccuracy.

In a press release, Heap’s office said it identified the noncitizens while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of 61,681 voters impacted by a longstanding state coding error by running them through a digital database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It said the database confirmed the citizenship of 58,782 of those voters, or 95% of them, but flagged 137, or 0.2%, as noncitizens. Of those, it said 60 had voted in prior elections.

But experts have long warned that the system that the office used — called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — is unreliable. A ProPublica investigation found that the system provided incorrect information to at least five states. In Texas, election officials in several counties found it had identified people as noncitizens who had already proved their citizenship to the state Department of Public Safety.

It’s unclear whether Maricopa County attempted to weed out false positives from its data. Judy Keane, a spokesperson for the recorder’s office, declined to answer questions about whether staff took any additional steps to confirm the voters’ noncitizenship status beyond running their names through SAVE.

The recorder’s office said it would refer the alleged noncitizens who had previously cast ballots to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. However, on Feb. 19, both offices said they had not yet received those referrals from the recorder’s office. Keane did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why the referrals had not yet been sent.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, said her office was not aware that county officials were using the SAVE database to identify noncitizens. She added that it was “imperative” for officials to independently research voters’ citizenship status before taking steps to cancel their registration, and said her office will contact the recorder’s office to determine whether those procedures were followed.

The recorder’s office’s announcement came hours after Heap, a Republican, appeared at a news conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Scottsdale. As a state lawmaker, he aligned with some of the farthest-right members of the Arizona House, and during his 2024 campaign for county recorder, he said there were “inconsistences and illegalities that happened” in prior elections. In last week’s press release, he framed his use of the SAVE system and his collaboration with the federal government as a move to ensure “election integrity.”

But in other states, Republican election officials’ initial estimates of noncitizen voters have often been found to be too high. For example, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate claimed in October 2024 that he had identified more than 2,000 noncitizens on his state’s voter rolls. Later, that number was revised down to 277. Officials in Texas, Missouri, and other states have been forced to make similar corrections.

“There have been times when a handful of election officials have acted highly politically in order to feed a narrative about fraud, and their claims so far have not withstood even minor scrutiny over time,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He added that “claims made without transparency about methodology,” like Heap’s, should “be taken with a giant mountain of salt.”

One of the reasons that estimates of noncitizens are often inflated is that false matches are common — often, several voters living in the same state, county, or city have similar names and the same date of birth. Plus, each year, hundreds of thousands of people become naturalized citizens, and they rarely take steps afterward to update their status with various government agencies. And when they do, government systems are often slow to update.

The SAVE system was initially designed in the 1980s to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. In Arizona, election officials have sometimes used it to verify a registrant’s citizenship. State law mandates that county recorders “use all available resources to verify the citizenship status” of those registering to vote without providing a passport, birth certificate, or similar document.

But the system long required specific identification numbers that local officials didn’t have for most voters. It also couldn’t verify the citizenship status of U.S.-born citizens.

That changed last year, when the Department of Homeland Security revamped the tool to add citizenship data for U.S.-born citizens and allow states to upload thousands of names to it at once. However, the rush to turn SAVE into a voter verification tool made it prone to errors, ProPublica reported.

In light of that, Becker said he suspects the recorder’s office’s claim about noncitizens on the voter rolls is “a vast overstatement that will shrink significantly under further scrutiny.”

“Even taking his investigation at face value — which I think is probably questionable — the rate of noncitizen voting in Arizona is minuscule,” Becker said. “I think the recorder just proved that Arizona is doing a great job of keeping noncitizens off its voter lists.”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

What if everyone had to prove their citizenship to register to vote?

2026-02-16T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Presidents’ Day is always the hardest holiday to shop for; it’s hard to know what to get the president in your life. But the U.S. House of Representatives got President Donald Trump exactly what he wanted when it passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday.

The act, which passed with the support of all 217 House Republicans but only one Democrat, is a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda to exercise more federal oversight over elections and prevent illegal voting, which is already very rare. It’s essentially version 2.0 of the SAVE Act, which passed the House last year.

Like its predecessor, the SAVE America Act would require people who are registering to vote to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship. (Currently, new registrants only have to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.) This version of the bill also adds a photo ID requirement for voters and requires states to run their voter rolls through the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to scan for noncitizens. All provisions of the bill would take effect immediately upon enactment.

But enactment is unlikely. The filibuster rule effectively means that legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Republicans hold only a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber. Some Republicans are pushing to turn the filibuster from a procedural formality into a literal requirement that Democrats hold the floor and talk indefinitely in order to block the bill, which could allow the bill to pass with a simple majority if Democrats run out of steam. But that would derail the Senate for weeks, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t making encouraging noises.

If the bill does somehow become law, though, it would dramatically shake up how the 2026 elections run. Only three states currently require all newly registering voters to prove their citizenship, and 27 states don’t require photo IDs to vote, so the bill would suddenly impose new requirements on millions of Americans.

And there are serious questions about whether it’s even practically possible to implement them all in time for the midterm elections. Election officials are sounding the alarm about how the bill would force them to build out entirely new procedures without the time or money to do so.

The SAVE America Act could stymie potential voters

The proof-of-citizenship requirement in particular would be a hassle for potential voters and election officials alike. According to a 2023 survey conducted by SSRS on behalf of the University of Maryland and three voting-rights groups, 9% of voting-age citizens don’t have easy access to a document that proves their citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization certificate.

Even people with the correct paperwork could be confused or inconvenienced too. Several election officials have compared a proof-of-citizenship requirement to the Transportation Security Administration’s slow rollout of REAL ID requirements. That policy was repeatedly delayed amid confusion over what documents were necessary to get a REAL ID and bottlenecks at driver’s license agencies.

The SAVE America Act would also effectively neuter the option to register to vote by mail or online, since new registrants would have to show up in person with their documentation.

In states that have already tried to implement proof-of-citizenship requirements, many eligible voters ended up getting disenfranchised. After Kansas started requiring proof of citizenship in 2013, 31,089 people were unable to register because they couldn’t prove their citizenship. That amounted to 12% of all the people who tried to register to vote in Kansas during that period. By contrast, the state could identify only 39 confirmed noncitizens who had registered to vote in the previous 14 years.

A court struck down Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship law in 2018.

An election administration ‘nightmare’

“This is bad for voters, but this will be a nightmare for election administrators,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told Votebeat.

Multiple election officials said that adding document verification to their already very full plates was a logistical burden that they were not prepared to assume. Many felt that it was simply not possible to implement a proof-of-citizenship requirement in time for the midterms, especially since the SAVE America Act does not provide them with additional funding to, for example, hire more staff to review documents.

“We are going to have significant challenges training all of our clerks and registrars to uniformly verify citizenship,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat. “We will have to create the training from scratch, and we don’t have the personnel to travel to all 487 municipalities [in Maine] to make sure that they’re doing it right.”

“If Congress wants to do this,” she said, “they should give the states the proper runway of multiple years and millions of dollars of funding per state.”

Justin Riemer, the president of the group Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, which has advocated for proof-of-citizenship requirements, was more optimistic that states were up to the task. “States will undoubtedly have to move very quickly to implement this legislation,” he said, “but there is precedent, as states did [quickly change their voting procedures] during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Riemer pointed out that a plurality of new voters already register through their state department of motor vehicles, whose staffs are already well trained in document verification thanks to the REAL ID requirements.

A proof-of-citizenship requirement would undeniably cost election officials more time and money, though. According to a social media post by Bob Page, the registrar of voters in Orange County, California, the county conducted an analysis last year of what it would have taken to prove the citizenship of the 633,568 people who registered to vote or updated their voter registration in 2024. The study found that, at an average of 10 minutes per applicant whose documentation needed to be verified, the county would have needed to hire 59 additional staffers at a cost of $6 million.

And according to a report from the Campaign Legal Center, proof-of-citizenship laws cost Kansas and Arizona (one of the three states where the requirement is currently in place) millions of dollars — in additional staffing, voter-education efforts, system upgrades, fixing errors, and defending against lawsuits over the requirements.

Ultimately, as long as the filibuster remains in place in the Senate, the SAVE America Act has little chance of becoming law before the midterms.

But that may be the point: The bill wasn’t introduced with the goal of making elections run more smoothly; it was introduced to make the point that elections aren’t as secure as they could be. If, as expected, the bill fails and voters don’t have to prove their citizenship or show photo ID in 2026, it could make it easier for Trump and his allies to claim that the results are tainted by fraud. That could be a different type of nightmare scenario.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Votebeat editor-in-chief Carrie Levine contributed.

Kristi Noem’s hastily-arranged Arizona visit stokes rumors in wake of feds’ unprecedented actions

2026-02-13T22:36:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made a hastily-scheduled appearance in Arizona on Friday to push for federal legislation that would institute photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements for voters nationwide.

The announcement that Noem was planning to hold a press conference about “election security” at an undisclosed location in Maricopa County sparked rumors, ultimately baseless, about the purpose of her visit and whether it signaled an election investigation. Her press conference was scheduled to be held just hours before her agency was set to run out of funding and face a partial shutdown.

Ultimately, her focus on the SAVE America Act highlighted the emphasis that President Donald Trump’s administration is placing on the legislation, which just passed the U.S. House of Representatives but faces a difficult path in the U.S. Senate.

Materials initially distributed to journalists announcing the event contained few details — just that Noem would be joined by local leaders to discuss election security.

The announcement came as the Trump administration has been taking increasingly aggressive steps on elections. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently conducted an unprecedented search of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, another critical election battleground. Last week, Trump said Republicans “ought to nationalize the voting.” The Justice Department is also suing Arizona for its unredacted voter rolls, one of 25 such lawsuits that it has filed against states and Washington, D.C..

As word of the event began to spread locally, supervisors in Maricopa County called an emergency, closed-door meeting to receive “legal advice” about their “authority and responsibilities regarding election administration.” Jason Berry, a county spokesperson, declined to confirm whether the sudden session on Thursday afternoon was related to Noem’s planned visit.

Meanwhile, election officials statewide told Votebeat that Noem’s visit caught them by surprise, and that they hadn’t been briefed on it.

Reporters who had RSVPed to attend the event were notified late Thursday that they should report to a DHS office in Phoenix. They would then be taken by shuttle to an undisclosed location with limited cell service and no Internet access, per the message.

That location turned out to be an office building for Homeland Security Investigations in Scottsdale, located about 30 minutes from the meeting point in Phoenix. Journalists were transported in unmarked government SUVs, and upon arrival, waited more than an hour for Noem to take the podium.

When she did, she asserted that it was “a fact” that noncitizens were voting in elections, and added that the SAVE America Act was “absolutely critical to our country’s future.” She was joined at the event by several GOP officials from Arizona, including U.S. Rep. Eli Crane, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, and others.

Evidence overwhelmingly shows that noncitizen voting is rare. Arizona already requires its voters to show photo identification at the polls and to provide proof of citizenship — such as a birth certificate or passport — in order to register to vote in state and local races. Voters can register to cast ballots in federal elections without showing such documents, but must still attest to their citizenship status under penalty of perjury.

Later, Noem blasted Arizona’s election processes and procedures, saying it needs “more improvement” than any other state.

“Your state has been an absolute disaster on elections,” she said. “Your leaders have failed you dramatically, by not having systems that work, by disenfranchising Americans who wanted to vote, that had to stand in lines for hours, because machines failed or software failed.”

Those remarks drew quick condemnation from top state officials. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, accused Noem of “grandstanding” and “spreading misinformation.” Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, said that Noem had not reached out to Fontes to meet with him about election security during her visit.

“Don’t come into Arizona there from Washington, D.C., and tell us how to run our elections,” Fontes said in a taped statement responding to Noem’s comments. “We’re doing just fine without you, thank you very much.”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Republicans introduce sweeping election legislation, but it’s unlikely to become law

2026-01-30T18:19:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Congressional Republicans on Thursday redoubled their efforts to regulate elections nationwide, introducing two new bills that draw heavily from President Donald Trump’s agenda.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, the chair of the House Administration Committee, unveiled the Make Elections Great Again Act, a bill that would overhaul several aspects of how elections are run, from limiting the use of mail voting to setting a national photo ID requirement for voting.

Later in the day, Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Chip Roy introduced the SAVE America Act, which combines a photo ID requirement for voters with the SAVE Act, a bill passed by the House last year to require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote.

Both the MEGA Act and SAVE America Act face long odds of becoming law anytime soon. Although the measures could pass the Republican-controlled House, they would almost certainly fail in the Senate, where the filibuster effectively means that legislation needs 60 votes to pass. (Republicans control the Senate only 53-47.) Given that both bills go farther than the SAVE Act, which has languished in the upper chamber for almost a year, there’s little reason to expect they would have any more luck in the Senate.

Trump and his allies have for years been intent on changing the way U.S. elections are run, building on their false assertions of widespread fraud. In recent days, billionaire Elon Musk has used his social-media site X to pressure senators to pass the SAVE Act, which may explain the timing of the two new bills.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has also attempted to exercise extraordinary power over election administration, suing 24 states and Washington, D.C., for not sharing comprehensive data on their registered voters and issuing a sweeping executive order on elections last year. The bills also come the same week that the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election from an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, in search of evidence of malfeasance.

So far, however, key provisions of Trump’s executive order have been struck down in court, and in recent months, he’s repeatedly called on Congress to pass legislation enacting his election-related priorities. The two proposals contain several policies from Trump’s 2025 executive order.

In November, the White House press secretary said the White House was working on a second executive order on elections, but one has yet to materialize.

What the Republican election bills would do

Should they ever pass, the SAVE America Act and especially the MEGA Act would represent the most transformative federal law aimed at reshaping national election administration in decades.

Both bills would:

Require Americans to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship (such as a passport) when registering to vote. Currently, new registrants must attest that they are a U.S. citizen, but most people aren’t required to provide documentation to prove it. According to Ballotpedia, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wyoming are the only states that currently require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Require voters to provide photo ID. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 23 states ask voters to provide photo IDs; in 13 states, non-photo IDs are acceptable, while 14 states plus Washington, D.C., don’t ask voters for ID. Notably, the ID requirement would apply not only to in-person voters, but also to mail voters, who would have to provide photocopies of their IDs (although the MEGA Act allows voters to provide unique identifying numbers, such as the last four digits of their Social Security number, instead). Currently, only Arkansas and North Carolina require mail voters to enclose copies of their IDs.
Require states to regularly check their voter rolls for noncitizens. For example, the MEGA Act would require states to compare their voter lists against the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database, known as SAVE, on at least a monthly basis. The Trump administration upgraded SAVE last year to make it easier to use for large-scale searches, and the department said in November that 26 states are now using it for voter verification.

The MEGA Act also includes a host of other provisions, such as:

Banning universal vote-by-mail. In other words, the eight states (plus Washington, D.C.) that automatically mail ballots to every voter would no longer be allowed to do so.
Prohibiting states from accepting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Currently, 14 states and Washington, D.C., do this, as long as the ballots are postmarked on time. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of this practice later this year.
Barring anyone except the voter, an immediate family member, or caregiver from possessing the voter’s ballot. Each state has different rules about who (if anyone) can return a mail voter’s ballot for them, but several have laws broad enough that allow third parties, such as campaign operatives, to do so — a practice Republicans have described as “ballot harvesting.”
Requiring states to provide hand-marked paper ballots. According to Verified Voting, nearly 70% of registered voters already live in a jurisdiction that uses hand-marked paper ballots. Most of the remaining jurisdictions use ballot-marking devices, which would be still legal under the bill, but they would need to provide voters with the option to hand-mark their ballots as well.
Outlawing ranked-choice voting. This would affect only a few jurisdictions. Alaska, Maine, and Washington, D.C., are the only places that use ranked-choice voting in federal elections in the regular course of business. However, Georgia also uses it for military and overseas voters, and Hawaii uses it for special elections.

The provisions in both bills would only apply to federal elections, forcing states to choose between changing their state election laws to match and administering federal and state elections differently. Either way, the bill would likely create more work for election officials. Given how many states would have to change their voting procedures, the enactment of either of these bills would send officials scrambling to adapt to unfamiliar requirements.

And if officials fail to live up to the law, they could be held liable in new ways. The MEGA Act explicitly allows the attorney general, and even private citizens, to file civil lawsuits against election officials for noncompliance.

Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, a Democrat, said that this type of broad mandate from the federal government “not only potentially disenfranchises voters, but it also ignores how under-resourced elections and secretaries of state are in general.”

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Correction, Feb. 6, 2026, 10:09 a.m.: This story has been corrected to reflect that Washington, D.C., will use ranked-choice voting starting in 2026 and that Georgia and Hawaii also use ranked-choice voting in some circumstances. It has also been corrected to reflect that the Department of Justice has sued 24 states and Washington, D.C., for not handing over their voter rolls, not 23 states.

Michigan investigation finds fewer potential noncitizens on voter roll than Republican official claimed

2026-01-29T23:21:42+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

A preliminary state investigation into potential noncitizen voters in Macomb County, Michigan, found one noncitizen who had cast a ballot in the county in 2018, but also found that several people whom the county flagged were actually U.S. citizens.

Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and a Republican candidate for secretary of state, said two weeks ago that he had found 15 people on Macomb County’s list of roughly 725,000 registered voters who had recused themselves from jury duty on the grounds that they were not U.S. citizens. Officials from his office said that at least three of those people had voted before, which Forlini described as evidence of broader problems with the state’s voter roll maintenance.

After her department investigated the claim, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Thursday that, of the three people Forlini’s office had flagged, one was a noncitizen, one was a citizen (and thus an eligible voter), and one was still under review but had last voted in 2024. The noncitizen last voted in 2018, and their registration was canceled in 2022.

Benson said during a press conference Thursday that while it is her department’s policy to refer noncitizen voters to the attorney general’s office, the 2018 case was “so long ago” that her office is reviewing the statute of limitations before deciding whether to pursue legal action.

Four of the remaining 12 voters Forlini flagged do appear to be noncitizens, according to Angela Benander, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State. The state will request additional information from them before canceling their registrations. Two more are U.S. citizens who are properly registered, three had already been removed from the rolls, and the remaining three are still being investigated by the state, Benander told Votebeat on Thursday.

“When we review our voter lists, it is not uncommon to find eligible American voters improperly labeled as noncitizens, whether by clerical error, change of citizenship status or otherwise,” Benson said Thursday. “We update our lists accordingly, so that eligible citizens aren’t wrongfully investigated, removed from voter rolls or stopped from voting.”

Comparing voter rolls to databases containing citizenship data like those produced by jury service can be an unreliable way to find noncitizen voters. Other states have tried it and ultimately came up with inflated numbers of potential noncitizens.

David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, joined Benson on Thursday. He said that “jury questionnaires are a really bad source of matching to voter files for a variety of reasons.”

He said those matches tend to produce false positives because those called for jury duty often lie about their citizenship status “to get out of jury duty, rather than having lied under penalty of perjury on a voter registration form.”

Benson criticized what she called “reckless accusations” that “can lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters.”

She also criticized President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which Forlini told media he had been in conversations with, for trying to force states to turn over voter rolls. Michigan, along with several other states, has been the target of one of those requests. The state turned over only the public file, with no personal identifying information, and is now facing a lawsuit over that decision.

Forlini did not immediately respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment.

Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. Michigan’s review of the entire qualified voter file conducted last year found that of the more than 5.7 million ballots cast in the 2024 general election, only 16 people were potentially noncitizens. Similar reviews in other states have produced comparable numbers: A review in Georgia, for instance, found only 20 potential noncitizens in its own voter rolls of 8.2 million people.

In Michigan, Republicans in particular have said that any instance of noncitizen voting is unacceptable and pushed for a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement in the state, rather than just an attestation from registrants that they are citizens. Democrats, meanwhile, including Benson, have insisted that such requirements would be too burdensome and would disproportionately prevent eligible citizens from voting.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Texas attorney general acted in bad faith against Latino civic group Jolt Initiative, judge rules

2026-01-29T23:17:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton failed to offer “any plausible proof” that Jolt Initiative, a nonprofit that aims to increase civic participation among Latinos, is violating the law, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Paxton had filed a lawsuit in state court accusing Jolt of submitting “unlawful voter registration applications,” specifying in a press release that the group was “attempting to register illegals, who are all criminals.” The suit, which seeks to revoke Jolt’s nonprofit charter through a legal mechanism known as a quo warranto petition, was put on ice by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, who said in his ruling that Paxton appears to be operating in bad faith.

The attorney general’s case against Jolt “supposes absolutely no wrongdoing,” and indicates that the attorney general may be “harassing [Jolt] and fishing for reasons to investigate its organization.”

This is not the first legal back-and-forth between Jolt and Paxton’s office. Last year, the organization successfully sued to stop the state’s investigation into its voter registration efforts. In the new suit, Jolt’s lawyers argue Paxton’s efforts to shut it down are retaliation. The attorney general’s office has also in recent years targeted other organizations aiding Latinos and migrants, such as the effort to investigate and shut down El Paso-based Annunciation House.

“For over a year, we have faced a relentless campaign of harassment designed to completely crush our organization and silence our community,” Jolt Executive Director Jackie Bastard said in a statement. “Judge Pitman’s finding that AG Paxton acted in bad faith confirms what we have known all along: this was never about election integrity, it was about political retaliation.”

The background: Case spurred by Maria Bartiromo’s debunked claims

In August 2024, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo said on X that a friend had seen organizations registering migrants to vote outside state driver’s license facilities in Fort Worth and Weatherford. But local officials, including the Parker County Republican chair, said there was no evidence backing the post.

Bartiromo’s debunked claims still prompted an attorney general investigation into organizations including Jolt.

Jolt then sued for a temporary restraining order, saying that Paxton’s probe would harm the organization as well as put its workers and volunteers at risk. In October 2024, both sides agreed to pause their legal fight and Jolt was allowed to continue its work, while the courts addressed a different lawsuit involving the tool used by Paxton to investigate the group. The attorney general’s office now said in its recent court filing that it has agreed to not issue another subpoena, instead opting to launch a new lawsuit.

In addition, Paxton announced earlier this year that his office is investigating cases of “potential noncitizens” casting more than 200 ballots in 2020 and 2022, which would be around one-thousandth of 1% of the votes cast during these periods.

Meanwhile, Texas counties are looking into more than 2,700 registered voters who were flagged as “potential noncitizens.” At least six of them have been confirmed to be U.S. citizens.

Voters also recently approved a constitutional amendment adding language to the state’s constitution saying that a person who is not a U.S. citizen cannot vote in Texas. Noncitizen voting was already illegal prior to this update.

Why Texas sued: Paxton claims ‘unlawful motive’

Following Bartiromo’s claims, the attorney general’s office sent an undercover agent to a DMV location near San Antonio to investigate by attempting to register a fake daughter — who wasn’t physically with him — to vote, according to Paxton’s Oct. 23 court filing. It said a Jolt volunteer deputy registrar still instructed the agent on how to register his daughter, despite her absence.

Paxton’s filing didn’t provide evidence of Jolt registering noncitizens to vote. Instead, it said the group’s decision to hold voter registration drives near DMV locations “illuminates its unlawful motive.”

“This is because U.S. citizens can already register to vote at any DMV with proof of citizenship,” the court document said. “Thus, there is no need for a VDR at such locations.”

In November, Paxton filed a quo warranto suit in Tarrant County, seeking to revoke the group’s charter and shut it down. Paxton claimed a “substantial part of the events” underlying the case took place there; Jolt requested that the suit be moved to Harris County.

“JOLT is a radical, partisan operation that has, and continues to, knowingly attempt to corrupt our voter rolls and weaken the voice of lawful Texas voters,” Paxton said in a news release at the time. “I will make sure they face the full force of the law.”

Jolt points to provision of election code

In response to Paxton’s suit seeking to shut them down, Jolt leaders filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to stop Paxton’s case in state court because it infringes on their rights under the First Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.

In particular, Jolt said in a court filing that its volunteer didn’t do anything wrong because Texas’ election code does allow for a person to appoint their parent as “an agent” to “complete and sign a registration application” for them. The parent must also be a qualified voter or must have submitted a registration application and be eligible to vote, according to the code.

Pitman, an Austin-based judge appointed by former President Barack Obama, agreed, saying Paxton’s office did not produce evidence of any wrongdoing. He took the unusual step for a federal judge of intervening to stop a state court proceeding, which he said was warranted because Paxton was acting in bad faith.

“The court does not come to this conclusion lightly,” Pitman wrote. “Given multiple opportunities to assert his good faith by pointing to any credible evidence of illegal activity or even general wrongdoing … Defendant could not.”

Michigan clerk claims he found 15 noncitizens registered to vote — but his data may not be reliable

2026-01-16T20:07:44+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and a Republican candidate to be Michigan’s next secretary of state, said this week that he had found more than a dozen noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls — but there’s reason to be skeptical of his claims.

Forlini told Votebeat on Thursday that a comparison of the county’s jury pool — specifically, the more than 230 people who have recused themselves from jury duty since September by saying they are not U.S. citizens — and the state’s qualified voter file found 15 people who were on both lists.

Forlini said his data shows that “the system is flawed” and needs adjustments. But comparing two separate lists is generally a fraught way to find actual noncitizens on the voter rolls, experts say, and verifying his findings will be difficult. As other states have repeatedly found, lists of people identified as noncitizens are often inaccurate or outdated. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people become naturalized citizens, for instance, and they rarely take steps afterward to update their status with various government agencies.

During a press conference Monday, Monika Rittner, a department supervisor in Forlini’s office, said that three of the 15 people flagged as potential noncitizens had voted before, including one who had voted “several times but has since been removed.”

The jury pool Forlini cited comes from the state driver’s license database, which is separate from the qualified voter file (even though both are maintained by the Michigan Department of State). People do not need to be U.S. citizens to get a license or state ID in Michigan.

David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and his team have looked into noncitizen voting complaints across the country and found that most allegations are the result of “misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data,” as CEIR detailed in a July report.

“It is extremely hard to compare data from a jury questionnaire to data in a QVF with certainty and without false positives,” Becker told Votebeat. “Even if you get that part right, there’s still multiple ways in which the data can be misinterpreted.”

Forlini argued that his comparisons were functionally foolproof. He said his team compared names, ages, and addresses to verify that it was the same person who appeared on both lists.

“The scope that we’re doing it, this wasn’t a mass-produced thing,” he said Thursday. “It was a list where we looked at each individual person.”

He has since sent the idea on to other county clerks, and said many of them have thanked him for it.

Forlini said Monday he was handing the information off to Macomb County Corporation Counsel Frank Krycia. On Friday, Forlini said Krycia had handed it off to law enforcement but declined to say which agencies, adding that he’d been advised not to name them while the matter was under investigation. Krycia did not return a call seeking comment.

Forlini is a Republican candidate to be Michigan’s next secretary of state, although he said he was checking for noncitizen voters in his “role as a county clerk.” Doing that work was a matter of “operational efficiency,” he said.

“I’m looking to make things better,” he said.

In recent years, Republicans around Michigan and across the U.S. have zeroed in on noncitizen voting as a threat to American elections. An instance in Ann Arbor in 2024, where a University of Michigan student from China allegedly cast a ballot and turned himself in before fleeing the country, became a focus of Republicans looking to pass a proof-of-citizenship requirement in the state.

The Michigan Department of State said it would look into the claims once Forlini’s office gives it the necessary information.

“We can’t fully evaluate his claims because he hasn’t shared specific details about the list he reviewed, how it was compiled, and how he determined these people were noncitizens,” Angela Benander, a department spokesperson, said in an email.

Noncitizen voting is extremely rare in Michigan and across the country. The Michigan Department of State conducted its own lengthy review of the state’s driving records and voting records last year and found that, across the state during the 2024 general election, it appeared a total of 16 noncitizens had cast ballots — 0.00028% of the more than 5.7 million ballots cast.

“Our department did several rounds of validation in this review to make sure that these individuals actually cast a ballot and to verify their citizenship status,” Benander said in an email. “In each additional round of review, we found more individuals who may have initially appeared to be non-citizens but were, in fact, a U.S. citizen legally able to vote in 2024.”

The state has since established “an ongoing review process” to identify possible cases as they come up.

Other states that have conducted similar audits have turned up similarly minuscule numbers. Georgia, for instance, found about 20 noncitizens in its statewide voter roll of more than 8.2 million people in 2024.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

The biggest voting stories in 2025 could shape important aspects of the midterm elections

2025-12-22T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

From Carrie Levine, editor-in-chief:

The Trump administration moved to exert unprecedented federal authority over elections this year in ways that continue to raise important constitutional questions. Federal judges have blocked major provisions of the president’s sweeping executive order on elections, but that court fight isn’t over yet, and the administration has already said it is working on a second such order. What will be in it? It isn’t clear.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is suing a slew of states in a bid to obtain personal information on millions of voters in what appears to be a new attempt to build an unprecedented national voter database, and the federal government is quietly planning a more muscular role for itself in vetting people trying to register to vote. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule in a major voting rights case. All of this has big implications for this year’s midterm elections and beyond.

From Jessica Huseman, editorial director:

As we head into 2026, I’m struck by how many of this year’s problems will continue unsolved: Redistricting is somehow still underway, election funding isn’t getting better, and election conspiracy theories continue. All this means election administrators are still struggling — a challenge made sharper by Trump’s renewed attacks and early claims that next year’s results can’t be trusted. Their job satisfaction worries me, even as I’m encouraged by how steadily the field is professionalizing.

From Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor:

Is it too obvious if I say redistricting? Dare I say the biggest electoral story of 2025 was the unprecedented rush — mostly, but not exclusively, by red states — to redraw their congressional districts in the middle of the decade for partisan gain. Six states, representing over a quarter of the nation’s House seats, enacted new maps this year, and a few more (lookin’ at you, Florida and Virginia) may do so in the months to come.

And of course, all of 2025’s fights over lines on a piece of paper will become very real in 2026, when those lines will actually dictate the terms of the elections to one-half of an entire branch of government. The results could include voter confusion, extra work for election officials, less competitive elections, and a U.S. House of Representatives that is less representative of the will of the voters.

From Natalia Contreras, Texas reporter:

Although it’s true that Texas’ redistricting battles took up most of the news cycle this year, Republicans’ ongoing push to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls will continue to affect Texans’ access to the polls in 2026.

During the regular legislative session earlier this year, Texas lawmakers tried to pass a law that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Voting rights advocates warned the move could disenfranchise eligible voters. The proposal ultimately failed, but the Texas Secretary of State’s office’s use of a federal database to verify registrants’ citizenship prompted it to flag 2,724 potential noncitizens on the rolls. Election officials raised questions about the accuracy of the data. U.S. citizens were among those flagged by the state in multiple counties, and election officials are still identifying more. In addition, the use of the federal database is being challenged in court, and a ruling may not land until next year.

From Hayley Harding, Michigan reporter:

As we gear up for the mega-election here in Michigan — the governorship, the secretary of state, every statehouse seat, an open U.S. Senate seat, and much, much more — I expect we’ll continue to see a battle between Jocelyn Benson and the GOP.

She remains the Democratic frontrunner in the gubernatorial race, which means attacks on her are an easy way for Republicans to shore up their own base. But will that hurt her with her fellow Democrats too, as her reputation is called into question? And what does that mean for her successor in the secretary of state’s office, regardless of their party?

Every political decision will have direct implications on at least the next four years of election administration in the state. Legislators from both parties feel like they’re struggling to make headway on their election priorities, and a reset of partisan power in any direction could make that even more difficult.

From Alexander Shur, Wisconsin reporter:

Ahead of every election year, Wisconsin clerks lobby the Legislature with the same request: pass a bill to let them count ballots on the Monday before an election. Time and again, they realize it’s easier said than done. This year was no exception.

Typically, legislators introduce a GOP or bipartisan Monday count bill, and it gets stalled somewhere in the Legislature. This year, after extensive infighting, there wasn’t even a GOP bill.

Why is this so important? Well, Wisconsin likes elections, and in 2026 there are four statewide ones. Barring sudden legislative action early next year, that means Wisconsin will remain among a select few states that can’t process ballots before Election Day.

From Carter Walker, Pennsylvania reporter:

Ballot dates. Ballot dates. Ballot dates. It is a perennial issue here in Pennsylvania: Should voters be required to handwrite a date on their ballot return envelope?

But we may have finality before the midterms. A case before the state Supreme Court could finally resolve it. It has been fully briefed and argued, and now we are just awaiting a decision. That said, who is to say some new legal theory, challenge, or piece of legislation won’t change the playing field again for 2026?

U.S. Justice Department sues WEC for not providing unredacted voter list

2025-12-18T22:42:28+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday after it refused to turn over the state’s unredacted voter list.

The Justice Department has said it is asking every state for its unredacted voter lists — versions of the voter rolls that contain personally identifying information such as voters’ full birthdates, full or partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license information.

The Justice Department has so far sued 21 of the states, along with Washington, D.C., that have declined to turn over the lists, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which is tracking the lawsuits.

“States need to give us this information, so we can do our duty to protect American citizens from vote dilution,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement, referring to the federal government’s ongoing efforts to find noncitizens on the voter rolls.

In that statement, the DOJ announced that three more states — Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee — agreed to provide the federal government with their full voter lists, joining Indiana and Wyoming.

The lawsuit alleges the election commission and Meagan Wolfe, its administrator, are violating the Civil Rights Act’s requirement for states to turn over certain voting records to the DOJ upon the attorney general’s request.

WEC met on Dec. 11 in response to the federal government’s request for the state’s data, ultimately voting not to provide it. Election officials nationwide, including WEC appointees, have said that providing that information would violate state law.

The Justice Department has said it is entitled to it under federal law, and withholding the data interferes with its ability to exercise oversight and enforce federal election laws.

In a letter WEC sent to the Justice Department Dec. 11 after voting against providing the unredacted voter rolls, election commissioners pointed to a state law that explicitly bans election officials from disclosing information like driver’s license numbers to most people who aren’t election officials.

The commissioners also pointed out that one of the laws that the federal government cited in its request — the National Voter Registration Act — doesn’t apply to Wisconsin, one of six states exempt from it. The letter further argues that the other federal laws that the federal government cited don’t justify the request for confidential voter information.

The lawsuit, unlike the DOJ’s letter to Wisconsin, doesn’t cite the NVRA, solely asking the court to find the refusal to release the list is a Civil Rights Act violation and require the state to release it.

Officials in both Republican and Democratic states have pushed back on the DOJ’s request for unredacted voter data, saying it could put voters at risk. They also say the DOJ hasn’t provided enough information on how the data would be used.

Dhillon said on a podcast that the states were withholding that information because states are embarrassed that their voter rolls were not sufficiently cleared of inactive or unlawful registrants.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Texas flagged some voters as ‘potential noncitizens’ but they had already provided proof of citizenship

2025-12-18T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas officials have now determined that 11 registered voters in Travis County flagged as potential noncitizens actually provided proof of citizenship while obtaining a driver’s license or state ID at the Texas Department of Public Safety, according to county leaders.

Votebeat earlier this month reported that hundreds of individuals the Texas Secretary of State’s Office identified as potential noncitizens had registered to vote at DPS, which requires proof of citizenship or legal presence.

State officials generated the list of potential noncitizens by checking the state’s voter roll — more than 18 million registered voters — against a federal database used to verify citizenship. The Trump administration overhauled the database, known as SAVE, this year, making it free for states to use and easier to search, and it has urged election officials around the country to use it to search for potential noncitizens on their voter rolls.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it had not initially checked the list of 2,724 potential noncitizens flagged by the federal database against DPS records. State officials in October sent the list to county officials and directed them to investigate the citizenship status of those flagged registrants.

Many election officials and advocacy groups have questions about the accuracy of the results SAVE cross-checks generate. Advocacy groups including the League of Women Voters have sued over the changes to SAVE, and the lawsuit is pending in federal court.

Celia Israel, the Travis County’s tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, said the verification that the 11 Travis County registrants had already provided proof that they were U.S. citizens is “confirmation that SAVE is not a reliable resource.”

In an emailed statement that stressed the need to “ensure that only eligible citizens participate” in elections, Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, described SAVE as “the preeminent data source on citizenship.” She noted that it is “a new tool for us. We are treating it as we would any data source, incorporating our normal checks and balances.”

DPS and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the SAVE database, did not respond to requests for comment.

Israel and her staff had for weeks asked both state agencies for help in verifying the flagged registrants’ citizenship status, hoping to prevent the removal of eligible voters from the rolls.

Earlier this month, DPS confirmed to Votebeat that the Secretary of State’s Office had requested information on 97 voters, matching the number flagged in Travis County, and Christina Adkins, the state’s elections division director, recently forwarded the results to county officials.

Adkins also told Israel that her office will run the list of 97 Travis County registrants initially identified as potential noncitizens through the SAVE database again “to see if there have been any updates to any individual statuses,” according to emails Votebeat obtained in response to a public records request.

“It would have made sense to have this from the beginning,” Israel said in an interview with Votebeat on Tuesday.

The Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to a question from Votebeat about whether it plans to check the entire list of 2,724 potential noncitizens against the DPS records.

Election officials are worried database is flagging eligible citizens

Votebeat sought information from 24 counties and to date, election officials who have responded confirmed they have collectively identified at least 33 U.S. citizens on the list. At least 218 people flagged, and potentially more, registered at DPS and should have been required to provide proof of citizenship that the agency should have on file, according to officials from 11 counties.

Israel said the new findings from the state raise questions about the accuracy of SAVE but also about DPS’s voter registration processes.

Her office initially found that 26 out of the 97 individuals had registered to vote at DPS. But the new information provided by the state shows that only eight out of the 26 who registered at DPS provided proof of citizenship to the agency.

The three other registrants on the Travis County list who had documented proof of citizenship on file with DPS had not registered to vote through the agency, Israel said, and 18 people who had registered through DPS nonetheless did not have documented proof of citizenship on file.

Israel said it’s not clear from the findings, when the registrants provided proof of legal presence to DPS. There’s a chance that some may have naturalized since. She said she is now seeking more details from the state, including dates of when the individuals provided their documents to DPS.

In October, when the Texas Secretary of State’s Office sent each county a list of voters it had identified as potential noncitizens, election officials were required to mail out notices to them seeking additional proof of citizenship. After 30 days, if there was no response, the registrations would be canceled. However, if proof is provided later to county officials, by law the registration must be reinstated immediately.

Responses to counties have been sparse, and at least one county official said that reports of arrests of U.S. citizens by federal immigration officials across the country could be a factor.

Remi Garza, the election administrator in Cameron County in the Rio Grande Valley, said he got a call from a family member of a registered voter who was hesitant to walk into a county building to turn in proof of citizenship documentation, even though they are an American citizen.

“They were afraid that there were going to be federal officers that would approach them while they were trying to resolve this,” Garza said.

The state flagged 68 potential noncitizens in Cameron County. Garza said multiple individuals had registered at DPS but declined to say exactly how many, citing his office’s ongoing investigation about the registrants’ eligibility. Garza said he plans to reach out to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office to ask for help confirming whether any of the individuals flagged have already shown proof of citizenship.

His office is also sending out additional notices to the individuals that were flagged in the county who have yet to respond, he said.

“We’re going to do everything we can to restore an eligible voter’s right to cast a ballot,” Garza said. “Hopefully, if they see that we’re working diligently on their behalf, that they’ll understand that we’re there to facilitate the process, not to become a barrier or obstacle.”

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Hundreds of Texas voters flagged as potential noncitizens may have already proven their citizenship

2025-12-02T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

County election officials investigating the eligibility of 2,724 Texas voters flagged as potential noncitizens have so far found that hundreds of the voters registered through the state Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote while obtaining a driver’s license or state ID.

DPS keeps copies of the proof of citizenship that registrants provide, such as birth certificates or passports. The agency also keeps copies of proof of lawful presence in the U.S., such as green cards, provided by immigrants.

But the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told Votebeat and The Texas Tribune it did not check the voters flagged as potential noncitizens against DPS’ records before sending the list to county election officials to verify citizenship.

And at least one county election official has asked Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson and DPS for help checking DPS’ records but has yet to obtain access to them, according to documents obtained by Votebeat through a public records request and an interview.

When Celia Israel, who oversees voter registration for Travis County, asked the state for help determining voters’ citizenship, Nelson’s office directed her to DPS, according to a letter Israel sent Nelson’s office last month. But that agency said it couldn’t help her directly, citing state law, records show.

Israel then wrote to Nelson and DPS officials, asking for help obtaining the records. Nelson responded to Israel Nov. 21 saying her office would “continue collaborating” with DPS.

Nelson’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Votebeat Monday asking whether it would seek to obtain DPS’ proof-of-citizenship records. But on Monday, DPS responded to a request for comment from Votebeat and said it had “recently received” a request from Nelson’s office for information on 97 people — also the number of potential noncitizens the state had asked Travis County to investigate. The agency didn’t confirm whether the request concerned those voters.

In an interview with Votebeat on Monday, Israel said she believes officials have a responsibility to check that data before placing a burden on voters. “These are tools that are at our disposal to ensure accuracy, and I think it’s our responsibility to use those tools before we ask a voter to demonstrate citizenship,” she said.

SAVE flagged several voters who registered at DPS

State officials generated the list of potential noncitizens by checking the state’s voter roll — more than 18 million registered voters — against a federal database used to verify citizenship. The Trump administration overhauled the database, known as SAVE, this year, making the database free for states to use and easier to search.

But experts and election officials have raised concerns about the SAVE database’s accuracy and reliability, and advocacy groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the changes and how SAVE is being used.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office in October forwarded the results of the SAVE check to county election officials and instructed them to investigate the eligibility of the flagged voters.

Votebeat contacted 24 counties regarding the results of their investigations, and counties that responded said they have so far collectively confirmed the citizenship of 16 voters.

Several counties also reported significant numbers of voters who registered via DPS. In Collin County, 59 of the 109 people flagged by the state had done so. In Bexar County, the state flagged 201 voters; 39 had registered at DPS. And in Brazoria County, nearly half of the 48 flagged had registered at DPS.

In Denton County, the state flagged 84 registered voters. Frank Phillips, the county’s election administrator, told Votebeat that 12 of the flagged voters have confirmed their citizenship. Of the remaining flagged voters, 14 were registered by county officials in error, even though they had disclosed they were noncitizens and ineligible on the voter registration form. None of those individuals had voted, and their registrations have been canceled, he said.

Phillips said 37 of the flagged voters registered via DPS. Phillips also confirmed that the county has now canceled the registrations of 58 flagged voters who either failed to respond to the county’s notices or had the notices returned as undeliverable. Under state law, county officials must immediately restore the registrations if the voters later provide proof of citizenship, even if they do so at the polls on Election Day.

State officials want counties to investigate matches

In her response to Israel’s letter, Nelson said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE database “is the most current and accurate data set available to states when it comes to determining a voter’s citizenship.” Nelson said her office searched the SAVE database using voters’ first names, last names, dates of birth, and full Social Security numbers.

“Even though the data we received from SAVE is considered a strong match, we directed counties to treat them as weak matches in order to ensure that counties conducted their own investigation,” Nelson wrote, according to a copy of her letter obtained by Votebeat.

Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, said an example of a strong match that would result in county officials removing someone from the rolls without further investigation or notice would be a confirmed death record. In contrast, she said, in instructing the counties to treat the SAVE results as weak matches, the state is ensuring further investigation before voters’ registrations are canceled.

Texas is one of more than two dozen states, including Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina, using or planning to use the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ overhauled SAVE database to check voters’ eligibility. The USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Texas has struggled to identify noncitizens before

Every year, millions of Texans register to vote or update their voter registration information while obtaining a driver’s license or ID at DPS. In 2024, 3 million people registered to vote through the agency.

DPS began requiring proof of citizenship and lawful presence to obtain a driver’s license or state ID beginning in 2008. In 2011, Texas legislators made the requirement state law.

Israel and other election officials have raised concerns about the accuracy of the list of potential noncitizens forwarded by the Texas Secretary of State, citing issues in the wake of the state’s past attempts to flag noncitizens on the voter rolls.

Last year, months before the November 2024 election, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that 6,500 noncitizens had been removed from Texas voter rolls. A joint investigation by Votebeat, The Texas Tribune, and ProPublica later found Abbott’s numbers were inflated and, in some instances, wrong.

In 2019, the Secretary of State’s Office announced that it had identified 95,000 registered voters as potential noncitizens and said that more than half of them had previously cast ballots. But many of the voters in question turned out to be naturalized citizens flagged due to outdated data, and the state ultimately settled a related lawsuit by agreeing to new procedures.

Those new procedures, which were codified into law in 2021 through the sweeping Senate Bill 1, require that DPS share data monthly with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office in connection with individuals who provided proof that they were not U.S. citizens — such as a green card or work visa — when obtaining a driver’s license or state ID.

State officials run that data against the voter roll and identify individuals “who registered to vote before they presented documents at a DPS office indicating their non-citizenship,” according to a 2021 advisory from the office to counties.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

She supports Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Texas incorrectly flagged her as a ‘noncitizen’ on its voting rolls.

2024-10-29T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom that engages with Texans. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories here and The Texas Tribune’s newsletters here.

Mary Howard-Elley fervently believes illegal immigration in the U.S. is a critical problem that only former President Donald Trump can solve. She says the continuation of his border wall and promised mass deportations will make the country safer.

She agrees with Trump’s unfounded claims that Democrats are opening the borders to allow noncitizens to vote, fearing that it could ultimately cost him the election.

Howard-Elley didn’t pay much attention when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott helped fuel that narrative by announcing that the state had removed thousands of supposed noncitizens from its rolls, claiming some had a history of voting.

Then the U.S. citizen learned she was among them.

The elections office in Montgomery County, just north of Houston, had sent Howard-Elley a letter in late January saying that she had been flagged after she indicated that she was not a U.S. citizen in response to a jury summons. She had 30 days to provide the county proof of citizenship or she would be removed from the voter rolls, according to the letter.

The retired Transportation Security Administration agent was confused by how the county could come to that conclusion. And she seethed at the idea that anyone would question the citizenship of a former federal employee with the “whitest name you could have.”

“Who is allowing people to do this to United States citizens? I understand we have a problem with immigration, but come on now,” Howard-Elley said in an interview.

The 52-year-old disputes the county’s claim that she responded to the jury duty summons by saying she was not a citizen. Instead, Howard-Elley said, she called and asked to be exempted from jury duty because of guardianship duties for three of her grandchildren.

The Montgomery County district clerk’s office, which organizes jury duty, did not respond to repeated questions and denied a public records request for Howard-Elley’s response to the jury summons, asserting it was exempt from disclosure.

Regardless of how she was flagged as a noncitizen, Howard-Elley wanted to ensure she could vote. She ordered several copies of her certified Louisiana birth certificate and confirmed receipt with an elections office employee. She thought the matter was resolved.

But Howard-Elley’s registration was not reinstated, making her the 10th U.S. citizen identified by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and Votebeat who was removed from the rolls as a potential noncitizen. The news organizations tracked them down as part of an investigation that found Abbott’s claims about the state removing more than 6,500 noncitizens were likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

The 10 U.S. citizens who were struck from the rolls represented a range of racial and political backgrounds, and most were removed as the result of human error.

Abbott’s press release provided fodder for Republicans warning that noncitizens could vote in large numbers and sway the election, though experts say such instances are exceedingly rare.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the federal government last week, claiming the Department of Homeland Security has refused to help the state check the citizenship status of some registered voters. The federal agency offers states access to a database that can be used to verify immigration status, but Paxton argued it’s inadequate and requires a fee for each verification. Ten other states use the database for voting-related purposes.

Neither Abbott nor Paxton responded to questions for this story. DHS has not filed a response to the attorney general’s lawsuit in federal court.

From left: Howard-Elley with her grandsons, Skylar Lopez, 6, and Bryson Lopez, 8, at her home in Splendora, Texas.

Howard-Elley’s case shows how eligible voters can be removed from the rolls — and how tough it can be to get back on.

She didn’t realize her registration was canceled until reporters called her this month. Darla Brooks, the Montgomery County voter registration manager, told both Howard-Elley and the news organizations that she had not been reinstated in March because her birth certificate arrived after the 30-day window she was given to prove her citizenship.

On Oct. 14, Brooks said Howard-Elley had now also missed the registration deadline for this year’s election and would not be able to vote.

The election official was wrong.

Multiple voting rights lawyers pointed to a state law that says counties should immediately reinstate voters’ registrations that were wrongly canceled. Brooks initially told reporters that the law did not apply to Howard-Elley because the county had followed proper procedures when removing her.

But when the news organizations brought the same question to the Secretary of State’s office, which provides counties with guidance on implementing election laws, the answer was different.

A 2021 agency advisory instructs counties to immediately reinstate voters removed for failing to respond to a notice as soon as they present proof of citizenship. They can even be reinstated at a polling place on Election Day.

Less than two hours after the news organizations sent the Secretary of State’s advisory to Montgomery County, Howard-Elley was back on the rolls.

“I’m sorry that Montgomery County has to be shown the law to abide by it,” Howard-Elley said. She added that this election would have been the first time in more than 30 years she failed to cast a ballot for president. “I just hope they don’t do this to anybody else ever again, because it’s not fair.”

Montgomery County Elections Administrator Suzie Harvey said her office had never had to deal with a situation like Howard-Elley’s, and while she likely saw the advisory when it was issued, she had forgotten about the specific guidance. She said her office worked quickly to reinstate Howard-Elley when the news organizations flagged the advisory, and she is gratified that Howard-Elley will be able to vote.

“That would have been extremely tragic,” Harvey said.

Not every voter has Howard-Elley’s tenacity, or news organizations asking persistent questions about how their case was handled.

“Voting should not be so hard that you have to be a lawyer or have lawyer skills to be able to vote,” said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Perales said it would take “heroic efforts” by the average voter to research the election laws and advocate for their registration to be reinstated.

Even then, the decision would depend on how election officials in their county interpret laws and guidance.

Three county election officials gave different answers to the question of whether they would reinstate a voter in Howard-Elley’s situation, though all stressed they would try their best to follow the law.

One said the voter should be reinstated. The other two said they would likely reinstate the voter after the registration deadline only if the county had erred in some way.

Those differences give “voters in some counties fewer rights than voters in other counties,” said Emily Eby French, the policy director at Common Cause Texas, a nonprofit that advocates for voting access.

Howard-Elley said she is disturbed at how close she came to losing her ability to vote. If reporters hadn’t called her, Howard-Elley said, she might have been turned away at the polls.

She said she worries about whether other eligible voters are among those labeled as noncitizens and that Abbott should look into whether there are more U.S. citizens among them. The lifelong Republican said state and county officials need to be held accountable to ensure more U.S. citizens are not erroneously removed.

“The system is very flawed,” Howard-Elley said. “I feel really sad that we’re in a situation like this. You would think in 2024 we wouldn’t have issues like this.”

She intends to cast her ballot for Trump.

How to dispute your removal

If your voter registration is canceled because you failed to respond to a letter trying to confirm your citizenship, here’s what you can do:

Contact your county elections office before heading to the polls. Show proof of your citizenship and ask to be reinstated.
You can also share this 2021 advisory from the Texas Secretary of State’s office on reinstating citizens to the voter rolls.
Common forms of documentation include a U.S. passport or certified birth certificate. See the full list of acceptable proof of citizenship in the advisory.
If you don’t find out until you arrive at the polls that you need to show proof of citizenship, that advisory still requires election officials to reinstate you immediately after you do so.
Contact the Texas Secretary of State’s office for additional assistance.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Lexi Churchill and Vianna Davila are reporters for ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. Contact them at lexi.churchill@propublica.org and vianna.davila@propublica.org.

James Barragán is a politics reporter for The Texas Tribune. Contact him at james.barragan@texastribune.org.