Trump Administration Sues States to Expand Voter Registration Purges
The Trump administration is suing 31 states and the District of Columbia to obtain voter files for large-scale registration purges using immigration databases.
The United States Department of Justice has filed 31 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to seize full voter files. This legal effort aims to facilitate large-scale voter registration purges using the SAVE immigration database, a tool managed by the Department of Homeland Security.
Republican-led states are already executing these purges through methods like confirmation postcards and database cross-referencing. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger cancelled nearly 471,000 registrations in August, while Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list of over 350,000 names for cancellation. In Texas, the SAVE database was used to purge thousands of voters, some of whom were legal citizens wrongly flagged as noncitizens.
Civil rights groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, have filed lawsuits to restore voting rights, alleging that these purges disproportionately target Black, Hispanic, and young voters. While GOP officials argue these measures prevent noncitizen voting, reports from the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute indicate that noncitizen voting is statistically rare and unlikely to shift election outcomes. These actions follow a pattern from the 2024 election, where millions of voters were removed from rolls or forced to use provisional ballots.
