The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will allow states to access federal citizenship data by June 30 and plans to monitor the flow of mail ballots for signs of voter fraud, according to a court document.

Amid a series of lawsuits, President Donald Trump’s administration is now moving to carry out a March 31 executive order restricting voting by mail ahead of the November midterm elections.

Democrats and voting rights advocates oppose the directive as unconstitutional election meddling by Trump and have sued to stop him. The president, who has long attacked mail ballots but votes by mail himself, says the additional rules will fight noncitizen voting, a rare phenomenon.

“No president has the authority to unilaterally rewrite election rules or dictate how states administer their elections,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters, said in a statement last week. The League of Women Voters filed one of at least five lawsuits challenging the order.

Potential disruptions

The order could carry major consequences for the midterm elections. Any new restrictions on mail ballots would risk disrupting how tens of millions of voters cast their ballots. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

But despite several legal challenges, the order remains in effect. 

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., in late May ruled against a request by Democratic groups to pause the order, finding that it was too soon to weigh in because federal officials hadn’t taken enough action yet. A second judge in Massachusetts held a hearing last week, but didn’t immediately issue a decision.

“The Trump Administration will continue fighting for the safety and security of American elections,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement shortly after the D.C. judge’s decision.

One portion of the order demands the postmaster general enact new restrictions on mailed ballots and not transmit ballots from states that refuse to provide the names of absentee voters. The U.S. Postal Service, despite its status as an independent corporation, has put forward a proposal in line with the order to require states to submit lists of voters before mailing ballots.

Now, Homeland Security is responding to another part of the order that requires the creation of lists of voting-age citizens in every state, which the Trump administration calls “state citizenship lists.” State election officials would receive the lists, which they could compare to their voter rolls in a search for noncitizen voters.

Homeland Security’s plans for the citizenship lists came into focus on June 5, when the U.S. Department of Justice filed a notice in federal court that briefly outlines the administration’s plans. The notice describes a two-part effort by Homeland Security and its subsidiary agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to comply with the order.

First, Homeland Security will implement a “State Voter Roll Verification” that allows state election officials to submit their voter rolls to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. 

SAVE is a powerful computer program that checks names against citizenship information held in a variety of government databases. It can flag registered voters as possible noncitizens, but faces criticism for incorrect identifications.

For the past year, states have already had the option to upload their voter rolls into SAVE. Some Republican-led states, such as Indiana, Texas and Wyoming, have used the system, while Democratic states have declined. It’s unclear how the State Voter Roll Verification would be different, if at all, from states’ current SAVE access. 

Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom.

Second, the Justice Department notice says Homeland Security will set up a registry for state election officials to securely access “citizenship-related data” from USCIS, the Social Security Administration and the State Department.

According to the notice, the “underlying data would remain in each agency’s respective system.” No other details were provided.

The notice also outlines Homeland Security’s intention to use the lists of voters that states provide to the Postal Service for investigations. It says DHS wants to “integrate” data on those voters “to monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

California elections

The notice comes as Trump renews his attacks on mail-in voting. Last week he alleged, without evidence, voter fraud in California, which held primary elections last week. California relies heavily on mail ballots and often counts votes at a slow pace — meaning final results sometimes don’t match election night vote totals.

“Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

While the executive order already faces a slew of lawsuits, the NAACP on June 3 filed a motion in federal court seeking to specifically block the Postal Service’s proposed regulations of mail ballots. The NAACP alleges the regulations violate a 2021 settlement agreement that requires timely delivery of election mail to all voters. 

The Postal Service has until Thursday to respond.

The American Postal Workers Union in a statement on June 5 denounced the executive order, saying the Postal Service serves all Americans. It is “not a tool for politicians” to pick which Americans receive which benefits, the union said.

“The Executive Order is an unconstitutional attack on the millions of Americans who vote by mail,” the union said, “and another front in an ongoing assault on voting rights in the United States of America.”

The Trump administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to empower states to review their voter rolls for noncitizens just days before elections, a change that voting rights advocates say would risk disenfranchising Americans.

The U.S. Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to wade into a legal fight between the Republican National Committee and a host of Democratic and voting rights groups over a series of voting restrictions in Arizona.

If the court takes the case, it could lead to a significant decision granting states greater leeway to purge alleged noncitizen voters close to elections and mandate that voters prove their citizenship — a key aim of the SAVE America Act, President Donald Trump’s signature elections legislation that’s stalled in Congress.

The high court’s decision could arrive prior to the 2028 presidential election.

Voting in Arizona

Arizona requires individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to vote in state elections. Residents who don’t offer documentation can still use a federal form to register, but can only vote in federal elections. 

Election officials must run the names of federal-only voters through a U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizens.

The Justice Department argues that the Supreme Court should affirm the Arizona law and find that it doesn’t violate the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 federal law that sets rules for how voters are registered and when states can remove them from their rolls. The NVRA imposes strict limits on canceling registrations in the 90 days before a federal election.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that Arizona’s law violates the NVRA.

“But that decision eliminates the flexibility the Act promises to States when enforcing their voter qualifications,” the Justice Department says in its brief.

While the Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to take the case, the underlying petition was filed by the Republican National Committee. Its chairman, Joe Gruters, in a statement said it was “unacceptable” that the RNC was still having to defend the Arizona law.

“Federal law is clear: only U.S. citizens have the right to vote in American elections,” Gruters said.

Appeals court ruling 

Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group that’s opposing the RNC in court, said in a statement the Justice Department’s brief shows “MAGA Republicans and their friends in the Trump Administration are once again trying to disenfranchise Latino voters in Arizona.”

Opponents of Arizona’s law argue the 9th Circuit decision was correct. The state law, they say, goes well beyond what’s allowed under the NVRA. Election officials may remove individual voters in certain circumstances in the run-up to an election but the law prohibits sweeping purges.

“States cannot circumvent the limits on systematic removals that Congress — exercising its express constitutional authority to regulate federal elections — put in place to ensure that eligible voters have adequate time to correct erroneous removal procedures, thereby protecting Americans’ fundamental right to vote,” the Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party argued in a brief filed Tuesday.

Democrats and voting rights groups warn about expanding use of Homeland Security’s SAVE system, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, that’s mandated under Arizona law. 

Initially a program used by states to check whether individual noncitizens were eligible for government benefits, the Trump administration has overhauled it into a tool that can verify citizenship by checking information in federal databases. 

SAVE can now check millions of names simultaneously. Many Republican states have begun uploading their voter rolls into SAVE to search for potential noncitizens. 

Critics of the program say SAVE has falsely flagged U.S. citizens, a problem that could be exacerbated if the Supreme Court allows its widespread use in the weeks before an election. Last-minute misidentifications could leave little time for voters to prove their citizenship.

Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said in an interview that the 90-day period serves as a “pencils down” time to minimize the possibility of errors just before elections.

“Anytime you’re matching one giant list to another giant list, you’re going to have mistakes,” Levitt said. “If you execute this systemic list maintenance two days before the election, those mistakes are going to keep eligible voters from voting.”

Voter purges

At a U.S. House hearing on the NVRA in December, Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, pointed to several voter purges, including a 2024 effort in Virginia, to highlight the dangers of last-minute removals. 

That August, Virginia’s Republican governor at the time, Glenn Youngkin, ordered election officials to scrub the state’s voter list for noncitizens. More than 1,600 voter registrations were canceled, with citizens swept up in the purge. The Supreme Court in October 2024 declined to overturn the purge.

“There is no dispute that states and localities must keep their voter rolls accurate and up to date,” Lakin wrote in her opening statement. “But the integrity of our elections is not threatened by the phantom menace of widespread noncitizen voting — it is threatened by aggressive purge practices that wrongfully strike legitimate voters from the rolls and by unnecessary barriers to registration that prevent eligible Americans from getting on those rolls in the first place.

Noncitizen voting

The specter of noncitizen voting has been a central focus of Trump’s second term, despite studies showing it’s an extremely rare occurrence. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

Utah recently announced that a review of its 2 million registered voters identified just 27 confirmed noncitizens and an additional 25 “probable” noncitizens — a miniscule percentage of voters.

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia in a so-far unsuccessful effort to force them to hand over private voter data so the information can be run through the SAVE system to search for noncitizens. In late March, Trump signed an executive order to restrict the transmission of ballots through the mail, though several lawsuits have been filed against it.

Trump also continues to demand that senators pass the SAVE America Act, even though it has stalled in the U.S. Senate. While the legislation would set a national proof of citizenship rule, some states have enacted or are weighing their own requirements. 

Republican attorneys general

Five states — Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, New Hampshire and South Dakota — ask for proof of citizenship when voters register for the first time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. One state, Wyoming, also requires proof when voters update their registration.

But Arizona was the only state before 2025 to maintain two separate voter rolls to enforce its proof of citizenship rules, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The distinction helps explain why the Arizona case is now poised for consideration by the Supreme Court.

A host of Republican state attorneys general, led by Kansas’ Kris Kobach, have filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the Arizona case. They say the 9th Circuit gutted Arizona’s “common-sense measures” to protect its elections.

“This case presents yet another assault on State efforts to promote election security,” the states’ brief says.

In addition to Kansas, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia signed on to the brief.

The Supreme Court has sent conflicting signals about proof of citizenship laws in the past. In August 2024, the court issued an unsigned order on its “shadow docket” allowing Arizona to enforce its proof of citizenship requirements for the 2024 election. 

But four years earlier, the justices declined to take a case over a Kansas proof of citizenship law. That left in place an appeals court decision blocking the law, which remains unenforceable.

The Arizona case would offer the Supreme Court a way to provide a more definitive opinion. If the justices decide soon to take it, they would likely hold oral arguments in the fall and potentially issue a decision next spring, more than a year before the 2028 presidential election.

The Justice Department’s brief says the case “offers an opportunity to resolve these important election-law issues outside the setting of a contested election.”