GoKawiilis a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
One messy database is threatening to disenfranchise thousands or even millions of registered voters, while leaving even more at risk of intimidation or data breaches, in the name of solving a problem that barely exists.
As the 2026 midterm elections approach, election and privacy experts are sounding alarms about the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program, which President Donald Trump’s administration has expanded to ostensibly catch noncitizens voting. Experts say that amounts to a dangerous, error-prone effort to centralize voter data. “The federal government doesn’t have the authority to do any of that and doesn’t have the expertise either,” says Eileen O’Connor, senior counsel at the Brennan Center. “Inserting themselves into the day-to-day functioning of state elections is unprecedented and disturbing.”
The SAVE program, created in 1987 to verify public benefit eligibility, queries federal databases to determine residents’ immigration status. Last year, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) began demanding nearly every state provide complete voter information to cross-reference against the program, then purge any voters the agency deems ineligible within 45 days. These state rolls can include reams of sensitive information, including social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and in some cases, voter participation history.
“Inserting themselves into the day-to-day functioning of state elections is unprecedented and disturbing”
Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the part of DHS that administers the SAVE program, said the administration “is dedicated to securing America’s elections,” and called it “critical that states have the information needed to administer fair and secure elections.” DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre told The Verge that the agency has authority under laws like the National Voter Registration Act to “ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections.” Those challenging it say the agency is going far beyond its authority. But while some states have successfully fought the order, 16 have agreed to hand over full voter registration lists, according to the Brennan Center, and two — Texas and Alaska — agreed to implement the purge.
In October of 2025, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson said an audit of over 18 million against SAVE data had identified 2,724 registered “potential noncitizens.” The state told local counties to further investigate the discrepancies and refer those they confirmed to be noncitizens to the state attorney general.
But SAVE is an unreliable indicator of citizenship. Among other places, it pulls from the Social Security Administration (SSA), which acknowledges that its information is only a “snapshot in time,” that can give “an indication of citizenship,” rather than “definitive information.” Recently naturalized citizens — who can legally draw benefits or register to vote — may not be recognized by this snapshot. DHS itself acknowledges that users of the program must verify any output besides “United States Citizen.”
Multiple studies as well as state investigations have found that extraordinarily few noncitizens vote in US elections. A 2014 analysis published in The Washington Post, for example, found 31 credible instances of voter impersonation out of a billion cast ballots since 2000.
“The administration has proceeded in the face of that known risk”
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