Sofia Minotti was surprised to receive a letter last October from her local elections office, saying she would be dropped from the voting rolls in 30 days unless she provided proof of her US citizenship.
Minotti, who was born in Argentina and moved to the United States with her parents as a toddler, has been a US citizen for years. She said she quickly sent a scan of her US passport to the Denton County Elections Office, preserving her right to vote in next month’s Texas primary elections. Denton County, north of Dallas, confirmed she had shown proof of citizenship.
“I felt offended,” the 24-year-old graduate student said of the scrutiny. “I’ve voted in every election since I was 18, and now my vote was coming under question.”
Minotti is among dozens of US citizens in Texas alone to have been ensnared in a massive drive by the Trump administration to search for immigrants and other ineligible voters on state voter rolls.
The impact goes well beyond one state. Texas is among some two dozen states using a federal database overhauled last year to try to verify voters’ citizenship — and has flagged potential problems on just 0.0003% of queries nationwide. One Republican election official in another state told CNN that “the vast majority” of voters in their state flagged by the system turned out to be citizens after further investigation.
“The federal databases are not up to date,” said the person who asked not to be identified for fear of drawing the ire of the Trump administration and other Republicans. “They are not accurate. The last thing we want to do is disenfranchise eligible voters.”
As President Donald Trump has vowed to nationalize elections, his administration has already launched several efforts to insert itself into functions traditionally left to the states. That’s sparked worries about whether the exercise of flagging noncitizen voters will ultimately provide the administration a tool with which to challenge midterm results.
Trump has long baselessly claimed that improper voting by immigrants has affected election outcomes, notably the presidential contest he lost in 2020.
“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 Eileen O’Connor, a former voting rights attorney in the Justice Department who is now a senior counsel with the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson argued in a statement that federal laws give the Justice Department “full authority” to ensure that states maintain accurate voter rolls.
“President 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,” she said.
CNN spoke with state and local election officials to examine how voter rolls are being checked against a tool known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
Officials in Democratic-led states have largely refused to participate in Trump’s voter-verification program, arguing that SAVE is unreliable and could lead to faulty matches that put legitimate voters at risk of being unable to cast a ballot.
States have made nearly 59 million voter verification queries since April, according to agency data provided to CNN. SAVE has flagged more than 18,000 suspected noncitizens among them.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said in a statement that the agency “is just getting started with SAVE enhancements and is committed to strengthening the program and expanding its reach.”
“We encourage all states to utilize SAVE to help eliminate voter fraud and restore trust in American elections,” he added.
Some Republican election chiefs say SAVE is another useful way to check their state voter rolls — provided that officials carefully vet the results.
Using SAVE as part of its research, Idaho turned up about 760 potential noncitizens among the nearly 1.1 million people on the state’s voter rolls, Phil McGrane, Idaho’s secretary of state, told CNN last year. Most of the people flagged were indeed US citizens, said McGrane, a Republican. Eventually, election officials winnowed the list to about a dozen cases that were sent to Idaho State Police for possible criminal investigation.
McGrane said enhanced citizenship verification is worthwhile to ensure “that there’s public trust in elections and confidence in the process.”
“The fact that we’re taking action (and) showing that the numbers are minimal, I think that’s really important for the voting public,” he said.
