Who Actually Controls Your Voter Registration?

Tuning In

People of a certain age will remember the 3D poster art craze. At first glance the ‘art’ was just a mishmash of dots and blobs of various colors, but if you relaxed your eyes and stared at it for a period of time a 3D image would emerge. Many people never could see the image, no matter how long or hard they stared. If you were lucky enough to see it, the image was ephemeral and easily lost. Blink and it was gone. Get distracted and it would disappear. Lose focus and the 3D reality of the image melted back into the chaos of blotches and color.

What the Trump administration has done and is trying to do to elections also paints a picture that’s difficult to see, but it too is easily lost—which is why it’s important we don’t lose focus.

Strong Signal

Tuning in the strong stories with weak reception.

This is the third installment in a three part series on the SAVE Act. So far we’ve covered the ‘How’ and the ‘What', this week we look at the ‘Why’.

The SAVE Act is just one part of President Trump’s effort to reshape elections in America. Today we explore where it fits into those plans, as well as other recent efforts by the Trump administration to exert federal control over elections.

First, a little refresher. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (also called the SAVE Act or SAVE America Act) [SB 1383], is a federal bill presented as a way to keep noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections.

The SAVE Act in a Nutshell

The first step in seeing the full picture is knowing what is in the SAVE Act, broadly speaking.

1. It requires proof of citizenship to register.
2. It puts election officials personally on the hook. Any official who registers someone who “fails to present documentary proof” of citizenship can be sued directly and faces up to five years in federal prison.
3. It protects provisional ballots. If someone’s citizenship is later verified, the bill can’t be used to throw out a provisional ballot they already cast.
4. It requires DHS to give states a heads-up when someone naturalizes. When a person in a state becomes a citizen, Homeland Security has to notify that state’s top election official — so newly naturalized citizens don’t get caught out by the new requirement.
5. It gives states access to federal citizenship databases. States can request help from federal agencies to verify a registrant’s citizenship.
6. It automatically purges voter rolls. States must submit their voter rolls to DHS, where they're checked against the SAVE System — more on exactly how that works below.
7. It effectively kills mail and online registration. The bill requires documents to be presented in person. It doesn’t clearly address registering by mail or online at all — which in practice means those options go away.

The Consequences of Proof

I covered the details of the SAVE Act proof of citizenship requirements in the first part of this series as well as the podcast, but I want to dig deeper into the effect these rules would have on citizens.

Surveys show over 21 million voting-eligible citizens lack ready access to documentary proof of citizenship. Also, access is unevenly distributed and disproportionately affects voters that are: lower-income, less-educated, and young. That same study found that nationally Democrats were affected more than Republicans, but on a state level there are instances of the reverse. In Texas there is a particularly large gap with Republicans being less likely to have access to documentary proof of citizenship.

This is before we even get to the name change problem introduced in the SAVE Act. It’s a complicated issue, but the basic problem is if your name on your official seal birth certificate doesn’t match your current government picture ID (i.e., drivers license) then your state of residence is tasked with coming up with a way to prove you are who you say you are. The sticking point is we don’t know what each state will require since we don’t get to open that mystery box until after the SAVE Act is enacted into law. The states must create their process under the guidance of The Election Assistance Commission, which may be difficult since President Trump fired all members of the commission in July of 2026.

There is another process in the bill for people to prove their name change is legitimate, an affidavit. The problem with this as an escape hatch is the bill also introduces harsh criminal penalties and potential civil liability for the officials accepting the affidavit if they register anyone who is not legally allowed to vote. On the flip side, there is no penalty for an election official who refuses to register a person who is legally allowed to vote. This has the very real potential to sway election officials away from accepting an affidavit.

Carry On My Wayward Citizen

We already have a good idea how things will play out if the SAVE Act passes. Kansas tried something close to this. For years, Kansas required documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. A federal court struck the law down in 2018. By then, it had prevented more than 30,000 American citizens from registering to vote. That’s tens of thousands of citizens blocked from their constitutional right to vote, in just one state.

“Although [former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach] was only able to demonstrate 39 cases of noncitizen registration going back to 1999, a federal trial court found that the law temporarily barred 31,089 U.S. citizens from registering to vote.”
— The Damage from Conspiracy Theories About Noncitizen Voting / Brennan Center for Justice

Arizona ran a similar experiment around the same time, with the same result. A 2004 ballot measure required Arizona voters to show proof of citizenship. In its first year alone, it kept more than 10,000 people from registering in Maricopa County. Statewide, a federal court later found the law had blocked at least 31,500 applicants.

A Maricopa County election official at the time had a pretty good guess why: most of the people getting blocked, they said, “probably are U.S. citizens whose married names differ from their birth certificates or who have lost documentation.”

This isn’t conjecture, this is what actually happened. As we found last week in our deep dive on noncitizen voting the numbers there are at best in the hundreds (and that’s being generous). This means tens of thousands of lawful citizens blocked—in every state—in order to catch a handful of cheaters. Quite the tradeoff.

Take Over

In February 2026, President Trump said Republicans “should take over the voting” and should “nationalize the voting.” Noncitizen voting was again used as the boogey man to explain why they needed to take control. I tackled the issue of noncitizen voting last week, but I can give a brief summary here: it’s never been proven to be a problem. Nonetheless, it is the excuse. 

The larger point here is the stated desire by the President of The United States to “take over elections”. The minor inconvenience for the President is the fact that The Constitution does not allow the federal government to “take over” elections.

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”
— The Constitution - Article 1, Section 4

Enter, the SAVE Act

As part of this “take over” there is one consistent thread, the Trump administration’s desire to put together federally approved voter rolls. With the Constitution being clear that the states have power over elections, not the federal government, they had to get creative.

The SAVE Act helps them accomplish this through a process framed as a verification service, and it goes something like this:

1. States send their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
2. DHS runs them through the SAVE System to check citizenship status
3. DHS “flags” get sent back 
4. States remove noncitizens after receiving “documentation or verified information”

But there is a catch. Critics point out the bill places no restrictions on what DHS can do with the data once it receives it. Nothing in the bill’s text says DHS has to delete it, can’t retain it, can’t cross-reference it with other federal data, or can’t keep building on it.

Even though the bill doesn’t explicitly legislate the creation of a national voter database, it hands DHS the raw material with no guardrail preventing it.

Additionally, the bill never defines what counts as “documentation or verified information.” It doesn’t say a SAVE System “flag” alone is enough. It doesn’t say it isn’t. That undefined standard is exactly what’s already gone wrong in practice — SAVE flags have turned out to be citizens 35% to 97.6% of the time in various state reviews, because states have been treating a computer match as “verified” on its own.

Law? We Don’t Need No Stinking Law.

Unable to push the SAVE Act through Congress, President Trump bypassed the legislature entirely by issuing an executive order. The order was immediately decried by election experts and challenged in court.

The executive order mandates the creation of lists of eligible voters in each state, and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to verified voters on these lists.

This wasn’t President Trump’s first attempt to change election law by fiat. A year earlier the President signed another executive order meant to reshape election law, but it was struck down in court.

This new executive order has bounced around various courts, including the Supreme Court, and recently was blocked by a federal judge.

“The “court finds, on one side, that immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” while “on the other side, that the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule,” Talwani wrote.”
— NBC News / September 4, 2026

It has again come back around to the Supreme Court, leaving the fate of elections in their hands.

Unprecedented

In addition to the executive order, the Department of Justice has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls — driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers included — from at least 44 states and the District of Columbia. Most states refused, offering only the publicly available version instead. 

The Department of Justice had to come up with a way around the constitution in order to obtain the data the Trump administration is seeking. That workaround was to invoke civil rights laws, written to protect voting access, as the legal basis for demanding this data. As of late August 2026, they’ve taken 30 states and D.C. to court over it, citing the NVRA/HAVA/Civil Rights Act of 1960. They’ve lost every single case decided so far.

It’s worth taking a beat to think about the previous paragraph for a moment. The United States of America Department of Justice devised a way to try and get around the Constitution in order to do something the Constitution never gave it the power to do. The fact they did so using laws originally designed to protect voting rights is the ultimate perversion.

Of the fifteen judges who’d ruled by mid-July, nine were Republican appointees — seven of those appointed by Trump. One of the earliest rulings stated: “The government’s request is unprecedented and illegal…it is not for the Executive, or even this Court, to authorize the use of civil rights legislation as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans.”

“The founders were very wise in singling out elections as a place where the president has literally no power. Only state legislatures and Congress have the authority to regulate elections, and courts have upheld this many times.”
— David Becker, nonpartisan election-procedure expert who advises officials from both parties, CNN / February 24, 2026

Why Do they Want it?

If the federal government doesn’t have the power to remove names from a voter roll, what’s actually going on? While the federal government doesn’t technically control removal, it does control which names get flagged and can apply pressure on states to act on those flags.

That’s the real shape of “federal control” here — it’s control by leverage over a process it doesn’t legally own, not direct control of the process itself. Which is also exactly why it keeps ending up in court.

The SAVE Act, if it ever passes the Senate, wouldn’t change the balance of power on paper — states would still be the ones removing names. What it would do is make the flag-and-pressure system permanent and mandatory.

List of Actions Taken to Get a List

How badly does the Trump administration want to create a national citizen/voter roll list? If you look at the amount of effort and resources funneled into the task, you’d have to conclude they want it pretty bad.

1. Mandate list data collection in the SAVE Act
2. Two Executive Orders as workaround to stalled SAVE Act
3. Sue states for access to their voter rolls
4. Rebuild & Repurpose the SAVE System with data from the Social Security Administration 
5. Incentivize states to hand over rolls voluntarily through the Election Security Partnership Act
6. Direct acquisition through federal law enforcement
7. Direct recruitment — getting states to just sign up

“They’re trying to prevent those people from being able to vote by mail, which is a critical means of exercising the right to vote in this day and age,” he says. “And they’re doing that through the exploitation of personal information through the creation of these lists.”
—John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) / Daily Guardian / June 18, 2026

Friction

One little talked about item in the SAVE Act is that the bill requires documents to be presented in person in order to register to vote. This effectively kills registration by mail or online and adds a layer of friction between the voter and exercising their right to vote. The thing about friction is, its effect is cumulative. 

Proof of citizenship documents many will not have—friction. The added red tape an estimated 69 million women will face because they took their husband’s name—friction. People purged from the voter rolls because of the high error rates in the SAVE System—friction. Add it up and suddenly you have a system with enough friction to affect a large chunk of the American voter base.

POSIWID

Recently a post by John Gruber at Daring Fireball taught me a wonderful acronym: POSIWID. 

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If you look closely, the picture the SAVE Act paints only comes into focus once you stop staring at what its proponents say it does and look instead at what it actually does. They shout, in growing angst, that we must act or the terrible horde will steal our democracy — while the actual result is the powerless losing their voting rights.

Signing Off

This ends our series on the SAVE Act but not our focus on elections. As the midterm elections get ever closer the Trump administration’s efforts to exert federal control over them increases at a furious pace. Next week we will look at the battle over mail in voting as well as other levers they are attempting to pull.

Last week’s podcast was delayed for technical reasons, but is now live. That means the podcast and newsletter will be out of sync for the next couple of weeks. We appreciate your patience as we work through these hiccups.

Thank you for reading, and until next week, stay tuned in.

Fritz