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President Donald Trump and the election conspiracy theorists he surrounds himself with are determined to exclude people from voting in the 2026 election based on one database: the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.

Why?

SAVE is an incomplete and flawed database that has been shown to produce a massive number of false positives, incorrectly identifying American citizens as aliens. Thus, using SAVE to exclude voters buttresses the lie that a significant number of undocumented immigrants vote in elections.

Trump’s latest effort came last week when he signed an executive order directing DHS to use SAVE and other databases to create, for each state, “a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” Trump’s executive order then directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute “individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots” to anyone not on the list.

The order, in effect, confirms that the administration aims to exclude purportedly ineligible voters by creating a national voter registration list. It is an effort to coerce states to use the SAVE database to purge voters or risk criminal charges. But SAVE, as its full name suggests, was designed to determine eligibility for government benefits—not citizenship. And, crucially, as NPR noted, “Not all of the data is necessarily up to date.”

Shortly after Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search the database for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.

Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.

In Missouri, for example, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. For St. Louis County, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. But the county immediately determined that 35 percent of the names were........

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