2026-04-05T10:00:55.546Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/05/politics/trump-voter-database-election-fraud
特朗普政府正加大针对所谓选民欺诈的行动力度，正采取新步骤构建全国公民数据库，并加大力度排查疑似非公民选民——所有这些都打着“选举诚信”的旗号。
这一最新升级举措包括一项行政命令、一名新获授权的检察官以及越来越多的诉讼，引发了批评人士的新警告。他们表示，政府从全美各地收集大量选民数据的举措，可能被用来阻止符合资格的美国人投票，并加剧人们对2026年中期选举合法性的质疑。
司法部已与国土安全部达成最终协议，将要求各州提供的敏感选民登记数据交给国土安全部，由其通过一项因不准确而广受批评的公民身份核查计划进行核查。
据三位知情人士透露，特朗普政府上周提出了一项针对迄今拒绝移交完整选民登记册的州的新潜在施压策略：将数亿美元的国土安全拨款与共享选民数据挂钩，要求各州将其登记名册与联邦移民记录系统进行比对，否则将失去相关资金。
海瑟·哈尼——一名持选举怀疑论观点的人士被纳入国土安全部负责“选举诚信”工作——在周四与负责拨款项目的联邦紧急事务管理局领导层的电话会议上提出了这一想法。截至周五，该举措尚未实施。去年，在国土安全部的指示下，联邦紧急事务管理局增加了一项要求，即各州必须将至少3%的拨款用于“加强选举安全”。
国土安全部发言人表示，他们“目前没有可公布的国土安全拨款项目变更计划”。
数月来，司法部一直向法院保证，政府在要求各州提供选民登记册上的敏感信息时，并非试图组建全国选民登记名单。但周二，唐纳德·特朗普总统签署了一项针对公民身份数据和邮寄选票的行政命令，此举似乎正是在组建全国选民登记名单，尽管宪法规定各州而非联邦政府是选举的主要管理者。
同样在周二，也就是特朗普罢免帕姆·邦迪的前两天，司法部长帕姆·邦迪宣布，她已任命一名此前曾质疑特朗普2020年选举失利的美国检察官负责选举事务。一位知情人士告诉CNN，新任北卡罗来纳州中区联邦首席检察官丹·毕晓普将审查政府获取的选民登记数据，并排查非公民选民。
如今，政府已起诉30个州和哥伦比亚特区，原因是这些州不愿主动提供未编辑的选民名单。在这些案件历经数月审理后，司法部一名律师在3月26日的听证会上首次在法庭上承认，获取这些机密数据的目标包括让国土安全部扫描这些名册，找出不符合资格的姓名。政府用于此次审查的国土安全部公民身份核查计划，已知会虚增登记在册的潜在非公民人数。
“数据的问题在于，你可以找到方法让它传达特定的叙事，”伊莱亚斯律师集团的诉讼主席伊丽莎白·弗罗斯特说道，该集团代表选民介入诉讼，反对司法部索要选民登记册的请求。“如果你用于分类或搜索数据的方法完全不透明，你就可以编造完全虚假的叙事。我认为，取决于这些选举的结果，还有很多类似的叙事即将出炉。”
自再次就职以来，特朗普一直声称美国选举存在欺诈行为——包括大量非公民投票——并指派多个机构寻找外国人破坏选举结果的证据。非公民若投票将面临起诉和驱逐的风险，而联邦选举中的选民必须签署具有法律约束力的声明，确认其公民身份。
今年早些时候，特朗普呼吁联邦政府“接管”并“国有化”某些地区的投票事务。此次最新的单边举措出台之际，共和党人已表示不愿修改参议院阻挠议事规则，以通过《拯救美国法案》，该法案将对选举进行全面改革。共和党人还在努力通过一项复杂的预算程序即和解程序，以党派路线投票通过该选举立法的版本，但此举胜算渺茫。
民主党人、维权人士和州官员迅速提起诉讼，试图在法庭上阻止特朗普的最新指令，选举专家预计法院将否决该指令，正如他们此前叫停了特朗普2025年选举行政命令的大部分内容，该命令要求对选民登记实施新的公民身份核查要求，并收紧邮寄投票规则。
白宫为司法部获取州选民名单的努力辩护，告诉CNN，此举将有助于确保各州遵守联邦选举法，防止美国公民违规投票。
“选举诚信一直是特朗普总统的首要任务，美国民众将他送回白宫，是因为他们压倒性地支持他务实的选举诚信议程，”白宫发言人阿比盖尔·杰克逊说道。“总统将尽一切权力捍卫美国选举的安全和保障，确保只有美国公民才能参与投票。”
特朗普的新行政命令是迄今为止最明确的表态，表明总统希望由他的政府而非各州来决定谁有权获得选票。
他的指令将利用公民身份和入籍记录、社会保障数据以及其他联邦数据库，为每个州创建“公民身份名单”，以确定谁有资格参加联邦选举。
但选举专家表示，由于内部数据存在局限性，联邦政府没有工具组建自己完整的合格选民名单，也没有这项法律权力。在没有州和地方当局额外调查的情况下，仅依靠移民数据来核查选民资格的小规模尝试，已错误地将公民标记为非公民，部分原因是过时的数据无法始终记录人们后来入籍的情况。
去年，特朗普政府悄悄修改了一项名为SAVE（即系统外侨资格核查计划）的联邦项目，该项目历史上用于公共福利核查，如今已成为各州用于排查其名册上潜在非公民的工具，司法部现在表示将利用该项目本身审查登记名单。此次改革扩大了输入该项目的数据库，将移民记录与社会保障数据库和护照信息关联起来。
已有二十多个州自愿使用SAVE系统来维护其选民名单，即便这种由州主导的操作也遭遇了反对。
3月26日，拉丁裔选民维权人士起诉德克萨斯州，称该州使用这一“考虑不周”且“不可靠”的联邦工具，导致合法公民被非法从选民名册中清除。
尽管如此，司法部投票部门代理主管埃里克·内夫在3月26日对罗德岛州法院表示，特朗普政府希望利用该系统自行审查各州的选民名册。
司法部去年向对提供敏感选民信息持怀疑态度的州选举负责人提出了一项拟议协议，称各州仅有45天时间移除政府认定为不符合资格的选民。司法部在法庭上表示，仅有两个州愿意签署该协议，但另有15个州已提供数据，且同意相关条款。
“他们想要集中权力，实际上是在替我们完成工作，这极其成问题且违宪，超出了国会授予他们的权限范围，”一位要求匿名以避免激怒政府的共和党州选举负责人今年早些时候告诉CNN。
在罗德岛州的法庭听证会上，内夫向持怀疑态度的法官保证，国土安全部的SAVE系统“实际上100%准确”。
但使用过该系统的州和地方官员表示，该系统错误牵连了大量公民。
德克萨斯州官员去年秋天在SAVE数据库中对其超过1800万选民的完整名单进行筛查后，识别出2700多名潜在非公民。但包括奥斯汀在内的特拉维斯县选民登记项目负责人西莉亚·伊斯雷尔表示，最初标记的97名选民中，有11人在向州驾照部门登记时已提供了公民身份证明，其余人员的调查仍在进行中。
“所有进入（选民登记）数据库的人都应该是合法有效的选民。但SAVE数据库似乎是一个不完美的工具，无法帮助我们实现这一目标，”伊斯雷尔告诉CNN。
在内夫发表上述言论之前，司法部在法庭上一直避免透露其希望将各州的名册与国土安全部的移民数据进行比对，其律师还 outright 否认了有关正在组建全国选民登记册的指控。
前司法部律师、现为州和地方选举官员提供咨询的大卫·贝克尔表示，最新的行政命令只会加剧那些在法庭上反对司法部索要选民登记册的人的努力。
“就在上周，司法部律师还在恳求法院相信联邦政府并未创建全国选民名单，而今天，总统明确表示这一直都是计划，”领导选举创新与研究中心的贝克尔说道。“这项行政命令将成为今后每起案件的证据。”
此外，特朗普支持的《拯救美国法案》将迫使各州定期将其完整的选民名单通过国土安全部系统进行筛查。
运营SAVE项目的美国公民及移民服务局发言人马修·J·特拉格瑟表示：“国土安全部致力于帮助消除选民欺诈，恢复美国民众对选举的信任，确保只有美国公民参与投票。美国公民及移民服务局一直在加强SAVE项目，并鼓励所有州使用该项目。”
特朗普已在政府各部门安排知名的选举怀疑论者负责排查选民欺诈。其中一人是司法部民权部门负责人哈米特·迪隆，她正领导这场索要州选民登记数据的运动。她上个月表示，对各州自愿提交的5000万至6000万选民记录进行的初步审查发现，超过30万名死者以及数万名潜在非公民。
“现在我们正在进行尽职调查，以确定他们可能或已经投票的程度，”迪隆说道。
迪隆声明的具体细节尚不清楚。司法部3月27日在法庭文件中表示，遵守司法部要求的各州未编辑的选民登记册尚未与任何其他机构共享，但国土安全部一位官员周六告诉CNN，司法部与国土安全部共享数据的协议现已最终敲定。不过，政府迄今为止公布的数据与外国人大量涌入选民名册的可能性描述不符。
国土安全部告诉CNN，自2025年4月以来，各州自行使用改版后的SAVE系统筛查其名册，在提交给该项目的6000万份姓名中，标记出2.1万名潜在非公民，比例为0.00035%。而这还不包括各州为调查和评估这些被标记选民是否真的是非公民而进行的额外工作，国土安全部自己使用SAVE工具的指南称各州必须完成这项工作。
一位民主党州务卿表示，他们担心特朗普政府及其国会中的共和党盟友可能会利用SAVE系统选民名册筛查的结果，作为拒绝认可明年中期选举中获胜的民主党候选人的借口。
“假设的情况是，一个州被迫将我们的选民档案通过存在严重缺陷的SAVE系统运行，然后联邦政府公布一份他们认定不符合资格的选民名单，”这位州务卿说道，他要求匿名以便坦率发言。
这位官员表示，各州将被迫要么采取激进且仓促的措施，在取消选民登记资格前核实每个人的公民身份——这会在选举前引发混乱，同时可能抑制选民投票率——要么拒绝配合政府要求的清理行动。但后一种做法可能会导致由共和党领导的国会拒绝承认在有争议的州当选的民主党议员。
“因此，这确实将各州置于一个非常困难的境地：要么在资源不足的情况下仓促应对，遵守一项违宪且非法的命令，要么可能在认证过程中遭遇不正当手段，”这位官员说道。
特朗普及其盟友一再质疑，如果正如他们所说，注册的非公民人数并不多，那么州选举官员为何会拒绝提供名单。共和党议员继续辩称，民主党人抵制选举改革是因为他们希望非公民参与投票。
拒绝司法部选民数据请求的选举官员还指出，本州法律对从居民处收集的机密信息设有隐私保护，政府效率部附属机构多次不当处理敏感数据的事件加剧了这一担忧。今年早些时候，司法部表示，一名政府效率部雇员同意与一个未具名的政治团体共享敏感的社会保障数据，目的是质疑选举结果。
“这一事件凸显了谨慎管理敏感选民信息的重要性，”共和党籍爱达荷州州务卿菲尔·麦格莱恩在2月份的一封信中说道，并拒绝了司法部的数据请求。“虽然我理解司法部关于爱达荷州数据将得到保护的承诺，但在没有明确法律义务的情况下，我不能承担这一如今显而易见的风险。”
司法部周三起诉爱达荷州，要求其提供选民登记数据。
Trump is trying to build a massive voter database. Election officials are afraid of what he’ll do with it
2026-04-05T10:00:55.546Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/05/politics/trump-voter-database-election-fraud
The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against alleged voter fraud, taking new steps toward building a national citizen database and ramping up its hunt for suspected noncitizen voters — all under the banner of “election integrity.”
The latest escalation — including an executive order, a newly empowered prosecutor and a growing raft of lawsuits — has drawn fresh warnings from critics who say the administration’s push to amass vast troves of voter data from across the country could be used to block eligible Americans from voting and stoke fresh doubts about the legitimacy of the 2026 midterm elections.
The Justice Department has finalized a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to give DHS sensitive voter-roll data the administration has demanded from states to be checked against a citizenship verification program that has been criticized for its inaccuracies.
Trump officials last week floated a new potential pressure tactic on states that so far have refused to hand over their full voter rolls: Conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security grants on sharing voter data, requiring states to run their registration rolls through the federal immigration records system or lose the funding.
Heather Honey — an election skeptic brought into DHS to work on “election integrity” — raised the idea on a Thursday call with Federal Emergency Management Agency leaders who run the grant programs, according to three sources familiar with the call. As of Friday, it hadn’t been implemented. Last year, at DHS’ direction, FEMA added requirements that states to spend at least 3% of those grants on “enhancing election security.”
A DHS spokesperson said they had “no changes to the Homeland Security Grant Program to announce at this time.”
For months, the Justice Department has tried to assure courts that the administration was not seeking to assemble a national voter registration list with its demands that states provide sensitive information about the voters on their rolls. But on Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order focused on citizenship data and mail ballots that appears to do just that, in the face of the Constitution’s command that states — not the federal government — are the primary administrators of elections.
Also on Tuesday, two days before Trump ousted her, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had deputized a US attorney who previously questioned Trump’s 2020 defeat to work on elections issues. In his new role, Dan Bishop, the top federal prosecutor for Middle District of North Carolina, will examine voter registration data obtained by the administration and search for noncitizen voters, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
The administration has now sued 30 states and the District of Columbia because they would not produce their unredacted voter lists voluntarily. After months of proceedings in those cases, a DOJ lawyer in a March 26 hearing acknowledged for the first time in court that their goals in obtaining the confidential data included letting the Department of Homeland Security scan those rolls for ineligible names. The DHS citizenship verification program the administration is using for the review is known to give an inflated number of potential noncitizens on the rolls.
“The issue with data is that you can find ways to make it tell a certain story,” said Elisabeth Frost, the litigation chair of Elias Law Group, which has intervened on behalf of voters to oppose the Justice Department in its lawsuits seeking the voter rolls. “If the methods you’re using for sorting or searching the data are not completely transparent, you can tell a completely false story. And I think there are a lot of stories that are waiting in the wings to be told, depending on how these elections sort out.”
Since returning to office, Trump has continued to claim US elections are plagued by fraud — including large numbers of noncitizens voting — tasking multiple agencies with hunting down evidence that foreigners are tainting the results. Noncitizens face the risk of prosecution and deportation if they vote, and voters in federal elections are required to sign legally binding declarations affirming their citizenship.
Earlier this year, Trump called for the federal government to “take over” and “nationalize” voting in certain places. The latest unilateral push comes as Republicans have signaled their unwillingness to change Senate filibuster rules to pass the “SAVE America Act,” which would enact sweeping changes to elections. Republicans are also weighing an uphill effort to pass a version of that voting legislation on a party-line vote through a complicated budget process known as reconciliation.
Democrats, advocates and state officials swiftly sued to block the latest Trump directive in court on and election experts expect courts to block it, just as they halted large parts of his 2025 election executive order seeking new citizenship verification requirements for voter registration and stricter mail-in voting rules.
The White House defended the DOJ’s efforts to obtain state voter lists, telling CNN the results will help ensure states comply with federal election law and prevent American citizens from casting ballots.
“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”
The new Trump executive order is the clearest assertion yet of the president’s desire to have his administration — and not states — decide who receives a ballot.
His directive would create “citizenship lists” for every state by drawing on citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security data and other federal databases to determine who is eligible to vote in federal elections.
But the federal government does not have the tools to amass its own complete list of eligible voters given the limits of its internal data, election experts say, nor does it have that legal authority. Smaller-scale attempts to use immigration data to verify voter eligibility, absent additional investigation by state and local authorities, have wrongly flagged citizens as noncitizens, in part because the outdated data doesn’t always capture when people are later naturalized.
Last year, the Trump administration quietly revamped a federal program known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) that historically was used for public benefit verifications but is now a tool offered to states to search for potential noncitizens on their rolls and one the DOJ now says it will be using itself to review registration lists. The overhaul expanded the databases feeding into the program, linking immigration records with Social Security databases and passport information.
More than two dozen states voluntarily use the SAVE system to help with their list maintenance, and even that state-controlled exercise has faced pushback.
Texas was sued March 26 by Latino voter advocates who allege the state’s use of the “half-baked” and “unreliable” federal tool has led to illegal purges of citizens from the rolls.
Still, the Trump administration wants to use the system to do its own reviews of state voter rolls, DOJ Voting Section acting chief Eric Neff told a Rhode Island court on March 26.
A proposed agreement the DOJ offered last year to state election chiefs who were leery of producing the sensitive voter information said the states would have just 45 days to remove voters the government had deemed to be ineligible. Only two states were willing to sign the proposal, but another 15 have provided the data with agreeing to those terms, the Justice Department has said in court.
“They want to centralize and essentially in effect do our jobs for us, which is incredibly problematic and unconstitutional and outside the scope of the authorization that Congress has given them,” one Republican state elections chief, who asked for anonymity to avoid the administration’s ire, told CNN earlier this year.
At the court hearing in Rhode Island, Neff assured a skeptical judge that the DHS SAVE system is “in effect 100% accurate.”
But state and local officials who have used the system have said that it’s ensnared a significant number of citizens.
Texas officials last fall identified more than 2,700 potential noncitizens after running their full list of more than 18 million voters in the SAVE database. But in Travis County, which includes Austin, 11 of the 97 voters initially flagged had already provided proof of citizenship when they registered with the state driver’s license division, while the county’s investigative process is still ongoing for the others, said Celia Israel, who maintains the county’s voter registration program.
“Everyone who’s on that (voter registration) database should be a valid and legal voter. But the SAVE database seems to be an imperfect tool to help us get there,” Israel told CNN.
Before those comments from Neff, the Justice Department had avoided saying in court that it wanted to compare the states’ rolls against the DHS’ immigration data, and its lawyers denied outright any allegation that a national voter registry was in the works.
David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now advises state and local election officials, said the latest executive order is only going to boost the efforts of those fighting the DOJ’s voter roll demands in court.
“As recently as last week, DOJ lawyers were begging the court to believe them that the feds weren’t creating a national voter list, and today, the president makes clear that was the plan all along,” said Becker, who heads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “The EO will be an exhibit in every case going forward.”
Additionally, the Trump-backed SAVE America Act would force states to periodically run their full voter lists through the DHS system.
DHS “is committed to helping eliminate voter fraud and restore trust in America’s elections by ensuring only U.S. citizens vote,” said Matthew J. Tragesser, the spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which operates SAVE. “USCIS continues to strengthen the SAVE program and encourages all states to utilize it.”
Trump has placed prominent election skeptics in roles across the administration to hunt for voter fraud. One of them is the DOJ Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon, who is leading the state voter-roll data crusade. She said last month that an initial review of 50 million to 60 million voter records voluntarily handed over by states found more than 300,000 deceased people and tens of thousands of potential noncitizens.
“Now we’re doing our due diligence to identify the extent to which they may or may not have voted,” Dhillon said.
The particulars of Dhillon’s claims are unclear. The DOJ said in court filings on March 27 the unredacted voter rolls of states that have complied with DOJ’s requests had not yet been shared with any other agency, though an agreement for DOJ to share the data with DHS has now been finalized, a DHS official told CNN on Saturday. Still, the statistics put out by the administration so far show a different picture of the possibility of foreigners flooding the voter rolls.
Since April 2025, when states used the overhauled SAVE system on their own to check their rolls, it flagged 21,000 potential non-citizens out of 60 million names submitted to the program, DHS told CNN — a rate of 0.00035 percent. And that is before additional efforts by states to investigate and assess whether those flagged voters are actually non-citizens, which DHS’ own instructions for using the SAVE tool say states must do.
One Democratic secretary of state said they are concerned that the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress could use the results of the SAVE system’s voter roll queries as a pretext for refusing to seat victorious Democratic candidates after next year’s midterm elections.
“The hypothetical is a state being forced to run our voter file through the deeply flawed SAVE system, and the federal government producing a list of voters that they say are not eligible,” the secretary of state said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly.
States would be forced to take either aggressive and rushed steps to verify the citizenship of each of those people before canceling their registrations — injecting confusion in the lead-up to the election while potentially chilling voters — or to refuse to go along with the administration’s demands for the purge, the official said. But that latter route invites the possibility that the Republican-led Congress will refuse to seat a Democratic member elected in the contested state.
“So, it really places states in a very difficult position of having to scramble without adequate resources to comply with an unconstitutional and unlawful mandate or potentially risk shenanigans in the certification process,” the official said.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly questioned why state election officials would withhold the lists if, as they say, there aren’t significant numbers of noncitizens registered. GOP lawmakers continue to argue Democrats are resisting election changes because they want noncitizens to vote.
Election officials who have declined the department’s requests for voter data have also pointed to the privacy protections in their own state laws for confidential information gathered from their residents, a concern that was exacerbated by repeated instances of Department of Government Efficiency affiliates mishandling sensitive data. Earlier this year, the Justice Department said that a DOGE employee had agreed to share sensitive Social Security data with an unidentified political group for the purposes of challenging election results.
“That development reinforces the importance of careful stewardship of sensitive voter information,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said in a February letter, denying the Justice Department’s data request. “While I appreciate the Department’s representations that Idaho’s data will be safeguarded, I cannot take that now-apparent risk in the absence of clear legal duty to do so.”
The Justice Department sued Idaho for its voter roll data Wednesday.