The broken database that could upend the 2026 election
President Trump and the election conspiracy theorists he surrounds himself with are determined to exclude people from voting in the 2026 election based on one database: the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE).
Why?
SAVE is an incomplete and flawed database that has been shown to produce a massive number of false positives, incorrectly identifying American citizens as aliens. Thus, using SAVE to exclude voters buttresses the lie that a significant number of undocumented immigrants vote in elections.
Trump’s latest effort came last week when he signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use SAVE and other databases, to create, for each state, “a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” Trump’s executive order then directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute “individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots” to anyone not on the list.
It is an effort to coerce states to use the SAVE database to purge voters or risk criminal charges.
But SAVE, as its full name suggests, was designed to determine eligibility for government benefits — not citizenship. And, crucially, “[n]ot all of the data is necessarily up to date.”
Shortly after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search SAVE for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.
Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.
In Missouri, for example, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. In St. Louis County, Missouri, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as non-citizens. But the county immediately determined that 35% of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133 — meaning at least 81% of the original data was incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and 90 days to appeal.
Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be U.S. citizens — our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”
Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, Texas, SAVE identified 84 non-citizens who were registered to vote. Twelve of those responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest of the group did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, but county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.
“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”
Trump’s executive order also attempts to weaponize the United States Postal Service (USPS), prohibiting it from mailing ballots to anyone who does not appear on the new federal list of voters.
Trump’s executive order, which would inject chaos into the voting process months before the election, is already being challenged in multiple court cases. These challenges have a good chance of success because the Constitution is very clear that states, not the federal government, have the primary authority to administer elections. Congress can pass laws that impact election administration, but Trump is attempting to invalidate state laws and procedures by executive fiat.
Trump’s efforts to enlist the USPS are also legally dubious, because it is an independent agency legally obligated to deliver mail throughout the country in a neutral manner. Trump’s order would transform the USPS into an arbiter of voter eligibility.
But even if this executive order is blocked by the courts, the push to purge voters from the rolls before November — or challenge ballots after the votes are in — remains a threat.
The other paths to a voter purge
Trump’s executive order is trying to force states to cross-reference their voting list with the SAVE database. But even before the executive order was issued, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced in November 2025 that 26 states “already have, or are in the process of establishing, a memorandum of agreement for voter verification with SAVE.”
The USCIS website specifically lists 24 states that have formally registered to use SAVE: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. It’s possible that more will join before the election.
According to the DHS, SAVE has labeled 21,000 registered voters submitted by states as “non-citizens.” Whatever happens with the executive order, the purging of voters based on SAVE data in these states will continue. It’s unclear what, if anything, each state will do to double check the list of non-citizens produced by SAVE.
Separately, the DOJ has requested detailed voter roll data from at least 48 states. The states were presented with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) from the DOJ requiring them to remove any voters the federal government deemed ineligible using SAVE and potentially other databases. In December, the acting head of the DOJ Voting Section, Eric Neff, said that 11 states were willing to comply with the MOU.
According to a tracker maintained by the Brennan Center, 12 states have provided (or committed to provide) a full list of registered voters, including drivers license numbers and other personal information, to the DOJ. (Several other states have provided publicly available voter data to the DOJ.)
The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to force them to turn over detailed voter registration. Courts have dismissed cases against California, Oregon, Georgia and Michigan. But the DOJ has subsequently appealed or refiled in those states. The rest of the cases are still pending.
If the DOJ is ultimately successful in some or all of those cases, it could use the data to pressure states to purge their rolls of voters identified as non-citizens by SAVE — just as the executive order contemplates. It could also use SAVE’s list of alleged non-citizens to challenge the results of close elections after the ballots were counted.
The other reason Trump wants voter data
The Trump administration has claimed that it is requesting states’ voter roll data to check for compliance with federal laws requiring states to maintain clean voter registration lists, including the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act.
At the end of March, however, CBS News reported that the DOJ and the DHS “are close to finalizing an agreement that will allow the federal government to use sensitive voter registration data for immigration and criminal investigations.” According to CBS, under the agreement, the DOJ would share state voter registration data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check whether non-citizens have voted or are registered to vote. Sources told CBS that the White House was also involved in discussions about the agreement.
The DOJ agreement with DHS appears to contradict statements made by DOJ attorneys in court. On March 3, during a hearing in Minnesota, the court asked DOJ attorney James Tucker if the voter data was being used for immigration enforcement. “Not to my knowledge,” Tucker said.
On March 19, a federal judge in Connecticut asked Tucker if the DOJ would guarantee that voter data would not be given to DHS. “I simply cannot state what the Attorney General’s purpose may be at some other time,” Tucker replied. “What I can say is, as of today, there has been no directive or instruction that the data, the non-publicly available data, is going to be transmitted to any other agency.” Tucker went on to say that, “Under the circumstances it’s not consistent with what the United States has specifically stated in its basis and purpose.”
But after CBS News asked the DOJ for comment on the agreement, a DOJ attorney acknowledged its true plans to the court. When asked by a Rhode Island judge if the DOJ could ask DHS to check for non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls, Neff said, “Yes, and we intend to do so,” the Rhode Island Current reported.
The timeline raises serious ethical questions about whether DOJ attorneys knew about the deal with DHS and have intentionally misled the court, which would violate American Bar Association rules. While CBS News “could not determine whether all of the lawyers… arguing the cases in court” knew of the plan, sources said that “at least a handful of senior attorneys from the Civil Rights Division have been privy to some discussions about the data-sharing plan… in addition to multiple officials in other Justice Department offices, including the deputy attorney general.”
Trump’s executive order further confirms that the Trump administration wants to use the voter roll data it is collecting to attempt to exclude purportedly ineligible voters by creating a national voter registration list.
As usual, a stunning report, and still more proof of how essential Popular Information is.
The word "optimized" in DHS's description of DOGE's handling of the SAVE database is doing an awful lot of work. Judging by the error rate, there's nothing optimal about it.