President Donald Trump is continuing efforts to obtain sensitive voter information ahead of the November 3 US midterm elections, despite repeated legal setbacks and limited evidence of widespread noncitizen voting.
Justice Department lawyers are expected to ask a federal judge in Maryland on Friday to allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to proceed with plans to compile lists of US citizens eligible to vote.
US District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland, is hearing a lawsuit brought by privacy advocates seeking to stop DHS from implementing an executive order Trump signed in March.
The order directs DHS to use federal government data to create lists of eligible voters and share them with state election officials. It also allows state officials to face criminal prosecution if ineligible people are found to have voted in their states.
The federal government has never previously created nationwide lists of eligible voters, while the US Constitution gives individual states responsibility for administering federal elections.
The plaintiffs argue that DHS’s plan would improperly collect information on American citizens from agencies including the Social Security Administration, potentially violating privacy laws.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that widespread voter fraud exists in the United States, including making false claims about his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
He has said the initiative is intended to protect election integrity and accused states of failing to do enough to remove noncitizens and deceased people from voter rolls.
Voting rights advocates and other critics, however, argue that the administration’s efforts could disenfranchise eligible voters, particularly those who lean Democratic.
They have pointed to the federal immigration database known as SAVE, which the executive order directs DHS to consult. The database has previously flagged some naturalised US citizens as noncitizens despite their legal status and voter registration.
Several Republican-led states have already compared their voter rolls against SAVE.
Trump’s wider efforts to obtain voter information have also faced legal and political setbacks.
His proposed SAVE America Act, which would have required states to check their voter rolls against the database, failed in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The Justice Department has also lost 25 lawsuits seeking to force states to hand over complete voter rolls containing sensitive information, including partial Social Security numbers.
The Supreme Court this month separately declined to allow Trump’s effort to tighten mail-in voting by requiring states to submit lists of eligible voters to the US Postal Service.
In a July speech, Trump claimed, without providing evidence, that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and deceased people were listed as active voters and said he had directed DHS to urge states to remove them.
“We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest,” Trump said.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis defended the administration’s position, saying: “Despite extreme Democrats and the media claiming it never happens, the evidence of noncitizens registering and voting in our elections continues to pile up.”
Democrats and voting rights advocates maintain that the administration’s focus on voter data and noncitizen registration could create obstacles for Democratic-leaning voters rather than address a genuine election security problem.
“You can’t do mass disenfranchisement without a voter file,” said voting rights lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm frequently represents the Democratic Party in court.
John Hill, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the plaintiffs in Friday’s case, said the threat of prosecution could pressure states into using DHS citizenship lists to remove voters from their rolls.
Justice Department lawyers have argued that the lawsuit is premature because DHS has not yet activated the online portal through which it plans to share voter information with states.
Meanwhile, software glitches and clerical errors in a dozen US states run by both Democrats and Republicans may have added more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens to voter rolls since 2000.
It remains unclear how many of those people actually voted, while experts said the number was too small to affect elections.
New Jersey, for example, said in July that a technology glitch had added 6,600 noncitizens to its voter rolls in 2023 and 2024. The state said fewer than 400 had actually voted and that there was no evidence the results of any elections had been affected.
State audits and independent studies have found voter fraud to be very rare. Since a 1996 law criminalising noncitizen voting was introduced, 129 people had been prosecuted for the offence, while the Justice Department charged another 20 people this month.
DHS has obtained voter rolls from at least 47 states and is reviewing them to identify registered noncitizens. It remains unclear how many of the records are complete voter files and how many are publicly available versions with sensitive information removed.
Public records often exclude details such as partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver’s licence numbers. DHS is also using information from a commercial data broker to supplement the records, although the extent of the department’s access to personal information remains unclear.
Even if the administration succeeds in Friday’s case, it remains uncertain whether the citizenship lists would affect voter eligibility in November.
Trump’s executive order requires DHS to provide the lists to state election officials at least 60 days before each federal election, a deadline that fell on September 4.
A federal judge in a separate case has also blocked the use of a revamped version of SAVE to verify voter eligibility. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to permit use of the revised database, but the justices have not yet ruled.
Ojo Triumph
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