By Jonathan Shorman for Stateline
Five weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s efforts to identify and weed out non-citizen voters have not resulted in the type of large-scale purges that could significantly affect the midterm elections.
Even a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling giving states access to a high-powered Department of Homeland Security computer program to verify voters’ citizenship will have limited immediate impact, election experts say.
As Republicans struggle to maintain control of Congress, Trump and his allies have spent the last year aggressively seeking to eliminate non-citizen voting.
They have questioned the security of the upcoming election, following the example of the president, who has long advanced false claims of voter fraud to dismiss unfavorable results.
These efforts now run up against federal law – and the reality long demonstrated by studies and available data that non-citizen voting is rare.
Little impact given the court decision
On September 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that states can access Homeland Security’s SAVE system, which relies on citizenship information stored within the federal government to scan voter rolls for possible noncitizens. A district court judge blocked the program in June.
But the high court’s decision came during a quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits most states from carrying out mass voter purges in the 90 days before a federal election.
The timing limits election officials to only seeking information about individual voters, even though Homeland Security has pitched SAVE to states as a tool that can quickly scan millions of names.
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The Supreme Court’s conservative majority acknowledged as much, writing in its unsigned opinion that the silent period “limits the potential impact” of the Court’s decision.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the Court’s three liberals, agreed that the ruling would have minimal short-term effects, but argued that the possibility of disenfranchising even a few legal voters outweighed any risk of harm to the government.
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, emphasized in a statement that voters will continue to benefit from the same safe, secure and reliable voting process this year as in years past.
“This decision will not have a significant impact on the 2026 election, because the systematic maintenance of voter lists is prohibited within 90 days of a federal election, which the Supreme Court has explicitly confirmed,” Becker said.
After 2026
The most significant consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision could come in the weeks and months after the election, when states can once again remove large numbers of voters from their voting rolls.
The Supreme Court is also expected to hold oral arguments in December in a case that involves the National Voter Registration Act’s silent period — leaving open the possibility that the justices will give states more leeway to purge voters before elections.
But for now, the restrictions remain in place.
“Until the Supreme Court says or reinterprets otherwise, quiet time remains quiet time,” Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy adviser at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview.
Separately, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s effort to require states to use SAVE as a condition of receiving certain Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. Judge Amir H. Ali, appointed by President Joe Biden, wrote that FEMA exceeded its authority in imposing election-related requirements.
Is the data reliable?
Critics of SAVE, which include Democrats and privacy advocates, warn that the system relies on incomplete and sometimes outdated data, leading to false positives. SAVE was previously used to check whether noncitizens were eligible for various government benefits before the Trump administration repurposed it last year as a tool to verify citizenship.
When U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, President Joe Biden’s appointee for a Washington, D.C.-based district court, ruled against the program in June, she pointed to sworn statements from naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data in SAVE.
“SAVE was never designed to verify citizenship: it relies on outdated and inaccurate data that produces false matches, risks disenfranchisement of eligible voters, and exposes sensitive personal information to misuse and malicious actors,” Tim Harper, project manager focused on elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonpartisan organization focused on civil liberties in the digital age, said in a statement.
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The Trump administration and some Republicans hail SAVE as a powerful tool for ensuring the accuracy of voter rolls and identifying noncitizens who should not be registered to vote. They note that its use by states is voluntary.
“It is remarkable that we had to file an emergency petition with the Supreme Court just to be able to use government data to prevent non-citizens from voting illegally. America’s elections are for Americans,” James Percival, general counsel for Homeland Security, said in a statement.
In an email to States Newsroom, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis criticized Democrats for not voting in favor of the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require voters to produce documents proving their citizenship before casting their ballot. The bill is stalled in the U.S. Senate due to bipartisan opposition.
“The American people overwhelmingly support this common-sense legislation that enacts basic election security measures like voter ID and ensures that only Americans elect America’s leaders. President Trump is absolutely right: We fix this now, or we lose our country,” Bis said.
How many cases of non-citizen voting?
The Trump administration’s intense focus on non-citizen voting — which also includes a legal effort to force states to turn over voter data to the Justice Department — contrasts with the extremely rare nature of non-citizen voting, according to previous studies and election experts.
The August U.S. Census identified approximately 24,000 instances of non-citizen voting in the 2020 election, out of approximately 160 million votes cast, or 0.015% of the total vote. A study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of non-citizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.
But Homeland Security has suggested that large numbers of noncitizens could be registered to vote. In July, the department said it had identified more than 250,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
On Monday, U.S. Senate Democrats wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that they could not trust those numbers. For example, DHS initially offered nearly 16,000 potential non-citizen voters in Nevada. Ultimately, the agency provided state officials with a list of 185 people who officials said were noncitizens. All turned out to be citizens.
“Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and every eligible voter across America has the right to vote — and should be able to do so without fear of being wrongly removed from the voting rolls,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s decision.
The alleged scale of Homeland Security’s potential non-citizen voter registration also does not match the scope of the agency’s law enforcement actions. Earlier in September, Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency, reported making 160 recent arrests in 1,600 open cases of voter fraud.
When non-citizens find themselves on the electoral lists, administrative errors are sometimes the cause. In July, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced that a software glitch caused about 6,600 noncitizens to register to vote and about 400 of them voted.
And in April, then-Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, wrote in a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that some noncitizens had been registered to vote due to a clerical error, even though they acknowledged on a voter application that they were not U.S. citizens.
“That is why we urge voter registrars to use all available sources to confirm a person’s citizenship status — including SAVE data and other information about the registrant — when investigating whether the person is eligible to be a registered voter,” Nelson wrote in an email obtained by Democracy Forward, a pro-democracy legal organization.
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