President Donald Trump wants lists: of every citizen in every state, of every voter who receives a mail-in or absentee ballot, and of the alleged noncitizens he says are casting votes.

That last one is proving hard to produce. In July, the Trump administration accused Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey and Nevada of harboring hundreds of thousands of potential noncitizens on their voter rolls. More than a month later, the Department of Homeland Security is struggling to provide any proof. And the lists it has produced are unverifiable and unreliable — and could risk eligible voters being kicked off state rolls, election officials from multiple states told MS NOW.

This week, the Supreme Court and a federal judge cleared the way for the administration to keep building its nationwide citizenship list of eligible voters and to use state lists that the U.S. Postal Service will refer to in restricting mail-in voting. 

Trump says the lists are needed to stop noncitizens from voting — a phenomenon so rare that his administration has struggled to document it. Election officials say the real risk runs in the other direction.

“The real threat is that eligible voters — your friends, family and neighbors — are recklessly and mistakenly removed from the voter rolls as a result of the administration’s fishing expedition for purported noncitizens,” a spokesperson with the California secretary of state said. 

Every step — from the citizenship registries to what Trump calls his “movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” — is being taken under the pretext of rooting out fraud, and is designed to justify a federal takeover of elections in 2026 and beyond, according to a bipartisan cross-section of state election officials and legal experts.

“There’s no way those lists are accurate,” Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the top election official in the state, said of the citizenship lists the Trump administration is attempting to create as it seeks voter data from states. “I can’t think of a worse way to run elections than to have the federal government meddle and do it. … And the Republicans who are pushing for this would be screaming bloody murder if Democrats were trying to do something like this.”

On a recent phone call between Pennsylvania election administrators and DHS officials, “it was clear that DHS did not have confidence that the numbers they have stated publicly were accurate,” a person at the Pennsylvania Department of State told MS NOW on condition of anonymity to address a conversation they were not authorized to discuss publicly. The state has not received a list of alleged noncitizen voters from DHS. If DHS provides credible evidence of noncitizens on the voter rolls, Pennsylvania will refer the names to the appropriate counties and notify law enforcement where appropriate, the person said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced that his state is “suing the Trump Administration to stop their unconstitutional attempt to change the rules and restrict mail-in voting.”

New Jersey tells a similar story. DHS has provided “no proof whatsoever” to support Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s claim that 35,152 noncitizens are on the state’s voter rolls, said a New Jersey state official, granted anonymity to address a sensitive topic. The state’s own review found that 6,600 noncitizens had been erroneously registered to vote — a small fraction of Mullin’s figure, and a count of improper registrations, not ballots cast. DHS has not explained how it arrived at the larger number.

California officials say DHS has “refused” to provide its methodology and data behind its claim that 190,832 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state. “DHS is already significantly walking back the number of noncitizen voters it claims to have verified on states’ voter rolls,” the California secretary of state’s office told MS NOW.

In response to state officials saying the noncitizen lists are unreliable, an unnamed DHS spokesperson told MS NOW they “accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross-referenced them with known illegal aliens in our systems. It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

DHS did not say whether the agency would share its state citizenship lists with the Justice Department, USPS or other agencies, or how far along it is in creating them. 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler said his agency is working in “good faith” with states “to ensure states’ voter rolls are accurate, up-to-date and do not include aliens who are not eligible to vote or to be registered to vote.”

Still, earlier this year Trump’s Department of Justice conceded that the citizenship registries the president ordered agencies to build and send to state election officials are likely unreliable, as Stephen Pezzi, a senior DOJ attorney, told a federal judge in May. “No list is ever going to be perfect,” Pezzi said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “Certainly, a responsible state wouldn’t throw everyone who isn’t on the list off the voter roll.”

“These lists, and all of this hyperbole, is just meant to create a sense of urgency and chaos,” said Utah’s Henderson, a Republican. “I don’t know what they’re trying to do except make people feel afraid, make people distrust election results, make people think that people are voting who shouldn’t when that’s not happening, certainly not in any number that’s problematic.”

Whether the administration can legally share the citizenship registries and mail-ballot lists among government agencies — such as DHS, the Postal Service and the Justice Department — remains unsettled. In May, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division issued an opinion arguing that the department could compel states to hand over sensitive voter data and pass it to DHS to identify noncitizens who may be registered. Multiple federal courts have since blocked those demands.

“It does look like a backdoor method to get at the voter rolls that were originally sought through other means,” said Pamela Smith, the president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election technology group. 

Lali Madduri, an election law attorney for the Elias Law Group, said that the administration is “really trying to sort of downplay what it is they’re doing,” and that “we should not take them at their word.” Her firm has sought an injunction against the Postal Service’s final regulation on behalf of several organizations aligned with the Democratic Party.

“The federal government has been very unclear about the steps that it’s taking to implement those lists right now,” Madduri said. If the administration tries to limit ballot access using the “equally unlawful” citizenship and voter data it is compiling, she added, it will be challenged in court.

The Postal Service plan — which would withhold delivery of mail ballots unless states surrender voter data — would “inject a level of chaos and dysfunction into the midterm election that is unprecedented, unwarranted and unacceptable,” Henderson said.

Some election officials also fear that federal prosecutors could use the state-provided lists after the midterms to charge them with allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots.

Another concern expressed by skeptics of the Trump administration’s efforts is the potential that after the midterms, federal prosecutors will attempt to use the state-provided voter lists as a means of charging election officials with allowing ineligible voters to gain access to a ballot.

“I don’t think election officials should be under that kind of threat burden,” Smith said, “when what they’re doing is doing a good job enabling all of us to vote.”

If the courts ultimately block Trump’s effort for 2026, the administration’s push to restrict mail ballots and compel disclosure of voter data won’t stop there. 

“It would disenfranchise millions of voters, but I think long term, we’re going to have to deal with it,” Henderson said. “Red states, including Utah, are going to have to be willing to sue over this if we need to to protect our own constitutional authority over elections and protect the voting rights of our citizens.”

The post ‘There’s no way those lists are accurate’: State officials warn that Trump’s citizenship data-gathering could purge eligible voters appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.