A Different Model Built from the Same Parts

On July 8, the Department of Justice sent a letter to election officials in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. It gave them five days to explain how they would prevent noncitizens from voting, and it warned that any official who failed to act "could be subject to criminal liability." The letter was signed by Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. ^[1] The threat of prison is new. The mechanism it is attached to is not. Two days later, the Department of Homeland Security announced that $1.1 billion in federal antiterrorism and preparedness grants would come with conditions: states must adopt hand-marked paper ballots, conduct five-percent manual audits, and run voter rolls through the SAVE citizenship-verification database — or forfeit twenty percent of their award. ^[2] It is the same funding-for-compliance architecture the administration deployed on food assistance earlier this year, when the USDA conditioned SNAP, WIC, and school-lunch funding on immigration enforcement, gender-identity policies, and DEI compliance. Twenty-one state attorneys general are challenging those conditions as violations of the Spending Clause, arguing they are unrelated to the USDA's purpose. ^[3]

Attempting to use this critical funding to further unrelated policy goals of the Trump administration is wrong and unlawful. — Josh Kaul

But the election application has two features the food-funding version does not. The first is the systematic dismantling of the neutral federal infrastructure that previously mediated election coordination between Washington and the states. In April, the administration fired all three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — the independent bipartisan body created after the 2000 election to support state election administration — leaving it with zero commissioners. ^[4] The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's elections division was gutted. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes election crimes, was cut from thirty-six prosecutors to two. The FBI's public corruption team and its Foreign Influence Task Force were disbanded. More than seventy-five career officials were removed from DHS and DOJ and replaced with political appointees, including some who had tried to overturn the 2020 election results. ^[5] The second escalation is the criminal threat. The Dhillon letter is not a grant condition — it is a direct warning of personal legal jeopardy for state officials who do not comply with the administration's interpretation of election law. No comparable threat was deployed in the SNAP, Medicaid, or USDA contexts. The food-funding model pressures states through their budgets. The election model pressures the people who run elections through the prospect of prison. The courts have blocked every prong of the administration's election effort. Judge Casper permanently blocked the March 2025 executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, ruling the president has no constitutional authority over elections. ^[6] Judge Sooknanan blocked the SAVE program expansion, finding that DHS and the Social Security Administration had unlawfully consolidated sensitive personal data.

All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens. — Sparkle L. Sooknanan

Judge Talwani ruled that the administration's use of a "Termination Clause" to revoke five billion dollars in already-awarded grants violated the Spending Clause — the same legal theory underpinning the challenge to the election-grant conditions. ^[7] Federal judges have dismissed DOJ voter-data lawsuits in at least fourteen states, calling the requests fishing expeditions devoid of factual basis. ^[8] And yet compliance is arriving anyway — ahead of the rulings, and despite them. A Georgia state senator has introduced legislation to shift the state to hand-marked paper ballots by November 2026, matching the exact mandate in DHS's terrorism-grant conditions. ^[9] Between thirteen and seventeen Republican-led states have already handed over their voter rolls to the administration, even as nine courts have deemed the demands unlawful. ^[10] The stated rationale for all of this is widespread noncitizen voting. The government's own data does not support it. A federal review of nearly fifty million voter registrations found that 99.98 percent had documented citizenship — roughly ten thousand flagged cases out of 49.5 million records, and being flagged does not mean anyone voted. ^[11]

Our election system is secure. It is transparent. It is verifiable. It is better than it’s ever been before. — David Becker

The SAVE tool itself, which the grant conditions require states to use, mistakenly flagged thousands of U.S. citizens as noncitizens. Missouri temporarily banned flagged voters from casting ballots. Texas ordered 2,724 people to prove their citizenship. Across seven states and thirty-five million registered voters, the tool identified roughly 4,200 potential noncitizens — a rate that does not validate claims of widespread noncitizen voting. ^[12] The distinction that matters is not between one policy domain and another. It is between a model that extracts compliance from a standing system and a model that extracts compliance while dismantling the system itself. The food-funding version pressures states but leaves the mediating institutions intact — the EAC, the career prosecutors, the cybersecurity teams that make federal-state election coordination function. The election version removes those institutions and threatens the people who run the system with prison. The same parts, a different machine.