Trump-backed SAVE Act is newest effort to collect private voter information
The administration is trying to consolidate state voter data into federal hands.
The Trump-backed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, or the SAVE America Act, as Republicans refer to it, is the administration's most recent effort to collect personal voter information, this time with a legal backing that could be more solid than previous attempts, an election rights lawyer told ABC News.
The GOP's signature piece of election reform, which requires voter ID at the ballot box and proof of citizenship to register, follows more than a year of continued efforts by the Trump administration to consolidate sensitive state voter data into federal hands.
The bill would mandate that states pull private information from the Social Security Administration, state identification cards and "other sources" that confirm citizenship status in an effort to root out potential non-citizen voters across the country, the bill text reads.
After the bill passed the House, the president has maintained the SAVE America Act must be passed through the Senate, going as far as refusing to sign the bipartisan housing bill passed by Congress until the SAVE Act was passed.
"It's like the Senate is a place that you send things when you want them to die. We can't do this, and we're not going to take this any longer," Trump said.
The effort has seen extensive legal challenges from voting rights groups and pushback from former government workers, arguing the country's founders never intended for election power to be consolidated in the executive branch. The founders wrote into the Constitution that states were responsible for administering elections.
"There is only one reason to oppose -- CHEATING!" Trump wrote on his social media platform.
What's the database?
A national citizenship registry, or national voter roll, is not a novel idea. Canada, for example, has required an eligible voter database to be maintained and updated since 1997.
The U.S. does not have a national registry of voters, instead delegating that power to the states, and would require a law passed by Congress to establish one.
The administration has instead pieced one together using the Department of Homeland Security's central SAVE database for immigration enforcement and data gathered from several government agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration.
The Department of Justice also requested nearly every state's voter registration list, which "must include" sensitive information like the voter registrant's date of birth, residential address and the last four digits of the registrant's Social Security number, according to an internal DOJ memorandum of understanding obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice.
These requests resulted in lawsuits from 30 states and Washington, D.C., over privacy protection.
The administration has faced a number of losses in court from these efforts, with judges permanently blocking or restricting Trump's election reform executive orders and dismissing 16 of the DOJ's attempts to harvest voter information.
"The Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act, and Help America Vote Act all give the Department of Justice full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls," a White House spokesperson told ABC News when asked about the status of these cases.
Kathleen Romig, former senior adviser at the Social Security Administration, worked as the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Homeland Security and other Trump-backed efforts to access voter data took aim at Social Security.
"Every baby born in this country receives a Social Security number. Every worker authorized to work in this country receives the Social Security number as well," Romig said. "It's the closest thing that we have to a national citizenship registry. But it is not that -- it never was that -- it still isn't that."
The administration's existing dataset, the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE database, is known to produce faulty reports. Compiling non-similar datasets leaves room for error, Romig said, and citizenship data is often out of date.
"If a person became a naturalized citizen in 2025, for example, SSA (Social Security Administration) probably doesn't know about it. The only reason that they would know is if that person went into a Social Security office and updated the status," Romig said.
What could it change?
Direct executive action to change election processes is unconstitutional and has proven difficult to remain standing through the courts. Changes from Congress, however, are typically upheld.
"Article One of the Constitution gives states the primary responsibility to set the time, place and manner of federal elections, but Congress can change any of that through legislation," Campaign Legal Center Director of Voting Advocacy Johnathan Diaz said. "That's how we've gotten things like the Voting Rights Act, like the National Voter Registration Act."
Constitutionally, Diaz said the SAVE America Act "would not have the same legal deficiencies as the Executive Orders," describing the legislation as "a fundamental shift" in the structure of American elections if it were to be approved.
"If the administration can determine who is American enough to register to vote, who can prove it sufficiently, then they would have a lot of power to shape the electorate," Diaz said.
The CLC litigated several challenges to election reform from the executive branch. Diaz said these recent efforts, like the language in the SAVE America Act, have played out before.
"Alabama, Virginia, Texas, Florida, they've all tried to do things like use driver's license agency data or, you know, data from other public benefits agencies to verify the citizenship of their voter registrants," Diaz said. "What happens inevitably every single time is they wrongfully flag tens of thousands of usually naturalized citizens as ineligible and remove them from the rolls or threaten them with prosecution, and then get sued by groups like ours."
The states that have successfully compiled a list, Diaz said, have safeguards in place to protect against any discrepancies.
"The SAVE Act wouldn't do any of that. It would mandate that the states use data sources that we know are incomplete or unreliable and require voters to provide paperwork that many people don't have in order to register to vote," Diaz said.
Romig, who spent most of her career protecting Americans' Social Security data, said she now worries about that information slipping through the cracks.
"It is the keys to the kingdom, to stealing someone's identity, your name, your date of birth, your place of birth, your Social Security number, of course, your mother's maiden name," Romig said.
When asked for a response to concerns of data security and executive branch powers, a White House spokesperson said Trump is "committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters."
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