Senate Democrats call Trump admin’s focus on state voter rolls a pretext for disenfranchisement

As the Trump administration has sought to muscle through changes to election laws and rules across the country, Democrats in Congress have steadily escalated their concerns about the potential for disenfranchisement.

At a public forum Wednesday held by Democratic lawmakers focused on elections and voter suppression, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., ranking member on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, issued a blunt charge at the White House and its Republican allies.

“Their goal is to amplify their false narrative of insecure elections to justify their power grabs and to make it harder to register to vote, to stay on the polls and to actually cast your ballot,” Padilla said.

Padilla was one of several Democrats and witnesses who accused Republicans — who did not participate in the forum — of inflating concerns about noncitizen voting to justify legal and legislative challenges to swaths of votes, sometimes based on minor paperwork errors that took place decades ago.

One of the Democrats’ key witnesses was Allison Riggs, the Democratic North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice who had her narrow, 734-vote victory last year challenged in court by her Republican opponent Jefferson Griffin.

Griffin and state GOP officials ultimately challenged 65,000 votes in four counties as illegal, including those belonging to people who didn’t have driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers on file and overseas voters. The challenge involved only voters in four Democratic-leaning counties, and only for Riggs’ race. It did not challenge those voters’ choices for the U.S. presidential and North Carolina gubernatorial elections.

A winding court battle saw Riggs spend more than $2 million in court costs to prove that her tabulated lead — which survived two recounts — was legitimate. While a federal court eventually intervened to declare Riggs the winner, she told lawmakers that “we came perilously close to watching our systems of rules-based elections crumble before our eyes” as state courts initially validated Griffin’s argument.

“Our state appellate courts were willing to give credence to the argument that the rules of an election could be changed after the election, to change the election outcome,” Riggs said.

She said she sees the legal battle over voter eligibility in her race as a blueprint for how similar challenges could be made in future elections.

“The precedent in my case is at the district level,” Riggs said. “We were prepared for it to go all the way [to the Supreme Court.] I think it is still likely [to happen again] absent our collective willingness to recognize this threat and take the appropriate steps.”

Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, which runs one of the largest voter outreach programs for military veterans and families, said many of the North Carolina voters who had their ballots flagged as suspicious in lawsuits from Griffin’s campaign and the Trump Department of Justice were members of the military serving overseas who followed state laws.

Riggs noted that her own parents were among the group of voters who had their eligibility questioned in Griffin’s legal challenge, emphasizing that her father initially registered decades ago using his military ID and has shown a valid ID during every election he’s voted in.

“President Trump has publicly attacked these ballots and pushed conspiracy theories about them,” Goldbeck said, in addition to disparaging those who registered through laws like the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act as taking advantage of a “voting loophole.” 

She also said current legislation being considered by Congress, like the SAVE Act, would require military voters and their families to register to vote in person using a passport, something that would be impossible for many people deployed overseas. 

Some observers have worried the Trump administration and GOP may be seeking to redefine how certain classes of voters and ballots are considered and handled by states and courts, chiefly by shifting the burden of proof away from the government and onto individual voters when it comes to validating citizenship.

The Trump administration and Republicans have justified such changes as necessary to ensure American elections aren’t tainted by noncitizen voting. Experts and post-election audits largely refute those charges, but GOP boosters have argued that even one noncitizen voting in a U.S. election is too many. 

In particular, they’ve pointed to the administration’s changes to the Systemic Aliens Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database managed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those changes include allowing states to search using Social Security numbers and to conduct “bulk” queries that can be matched against various state and federal databases.

Just how USCIS and state election officials use this information when identifying voters for potential removal from state voter rolls remains to be seen — and experts say the amount of time and assistance states provide to help voters cure any paperwork problems will be critical. A brief by the Fair Elections Center this week questioned the accuracy of using Social Security numbers to validate citizenship information of voters, noting the Social Security Administration didn’t even start requiring such information for applicants until 1972.

According to VoteBeat, David Jennings, the technology and policy lead for SAVE at USCIS, reportedly told state officials at an Oklahoma conference that the agency doesn’t share SAVE data with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or other agencies. He described SAVE as a “tool” for states to use when making decisions around a voter’s registration status, not the sole criteria.

The administration is also suing states, sending them information requests and working with cooperative ones to build a massive query system across state data streams that experts say is likely to sweep in far more eligible voters and ballots than noncitizens registered to vote.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, described these data requests as “either illegal or [an] attempt to effectuate illegal acts” that violate the U.S. Privacy Act of 1972, which prohibits federal agencies from collecting and sharing large amounts of personal information on Americans.

Meanwhile, policy blueprints like Project 2025 propose “in plain view, a monstrous abuse of DOJ authority, pursuing faceless persecutions of elections officials” that mirrors the White House’s ongoing efforts to impose its will on state and local election rules, Levitt said.While most judges are pushing back, and election officials are largely standing firm in most states, Levitt worries that they will have to carry out their duties securing U.S. elections “despite, not alongside, our federal government.”