President Donald Trump's push to audit voter rolls has already ensnared numerous U.S. citizens, according to a new analysis.
Dozens of Americans, including 24-year-old Sofia Minotti, have been flagged in Texas alone as part of a Trump administration push to weed out immigrants and other ineligible voters on state voter rolls, as the president calls for elections to be nationalized, reported CNN.
“I felt offended,” said Minotti, who was born in Argentina, came to the U.S. as a toddler and has been a citizen for years. “I’ve voted in every election since I was 18, and now my vote was coming under question.”
Minotti, a graduate student, received notice in October that she must provide proof of citizenship or be dropped from the voting rolls. She preserved her right to vote by scanning her passport and sending that image to her county election office. Still, a Republican election official told CNN “the vast majority” of voters flagged by the federal system turned out to be eligible citizens.
“The federal databases are not up to date,” said that official, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration or other Republicans. “They are not accurate. The last thing we want to do is disenfranchise eligible voters.”
Trump has for years baselessly claimed that immigrants voting illegally have changed election outcomes, but a former voting rights attorney for the Justice Department told CNN that the president was working to rig the next election in his party's favor.
“It’s an attempt to exert pressure and control that is completely inappropriate and to lay the groundwork to be able to call into question the results if they don’t go the way that the administration wants them to go,” said former DOJ attorney Eileen O’Connor, who is now a senior counsel with the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice.
The Trump administration has expanded the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program to verify voter citizenship by linking it to Social Security and passport data, allowing free bulk uploads of voter records. Since April, states have made nearly 59 million verification queries, flagging over 18,000 suspected noncitizens.
Democratic-led states largely refuse participation, citing reliability risks to legitimate voters. Republican officials defend SAVE as essential for election integrity, though Idaho's experience shows most flagged individuals were actually citizens.
Idaho turned up 760 potential noncitizens among nearly 1.1 million on its voter rolls, but most of those were actually U.S. citizens, according to Republican Secretary of State Phil McGrane, and the state eventually came up with about a dozen cases that were sent to state police for further investigation.
“The fact that we’re taking action (and) showing that the numbers are minimal, I think that’s really important for the voting public,” McGrane said.
Texas was among the first states to run its entire list – which numbers more than 18 million register voters – through the revamped SAVE tool, and Secretary of State Jane Nelson said the state's analysis found 2,724 suspected noncitizens and gave those voters 30 days to verify their citizenship – but election officials there kept finding citizens who were mistakenly flagged.
“It’s pretty clear that the list isn’t as close to accurate as the federal government thinks,” said Chris McGinn, the executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.