Republicans in Congress want states to have more power to remove voters

A voter fills out a ballot during Tuesday’s runoff for Miami mayor. Republican lawmakers in Congress are interested in changing a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which some conservatives say makes it too tough for states to update voter rolls. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Republicans in Congress want to give states more power to remove ineligible voters — including non-citizens and people who have moved or died — from voter rolls in a bid to bolster the Trump administration’s efforts to tidy up the rolls.

During a Wednesday hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives, lawmakers considered amending the landmark federal voter registration law, the 1993 Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, which requires state motoring agencies to provide residents with the opportunity to register to vote. Some conservatives say the law makes it too tough for states to update voter rolls.

Since President Donald Trump took office, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have stepped up efforts to collect voter data and pressure state officials to be more aggressive in maintaining rolls to ensure that everyone on the list is eligible to vote.

Some Democrats and privacy advocates have raised concerns about how the Trump administration plans to exploit the information. The Justice Department has sued more than a dozen mostly Democratic states in an attempt to force officials to turn over lists of registered voters.

Although Republicans control Congress and the White House, any action taken by the GOP will likely face a filibuster by Democrats in the Senate. The chance that major voting legislation will be approved by Congress before the November 2026 midterm elections is minimal.

But Wednesday’s hearing before the Subcommittee on Elections of the House Administration Committee showed that at least some Republicans in Congress fully support the Trump administration’s efforts to involve the federal government in the voter roll maintenance process, which has historically been left to the states.

But other measures taken by Congress related to the election have stalled. In April, the House passed a bill that would require voters to show proof of citizenship when registering, but the bill stalled in the Senate. Trump tried to impose a citizenship requirement through an executive order that was blocked in federal court.

U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee, a Florida Republican who chairs the subcommittee, said the NVRA’s language regarding maintaining state voter rolls should be clearer. The law requires states to have a general maintenance program, but leaves many of the details to the states.

“Election officials benefit from clear and unambiguous regulations to help them carry out their duties and ensure voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date,” Lee said at the hearing.

Data sharing options

Michael Morley, a law professor and faculty director of the Election Law Center at Florida State University, testified that the NVRA only allows states to expel voters due to changes in their circumstances, such as a criminal conviction or death. He added that the law does not expressly allow states to remove voters who should not have been registered in the first place.

Morley urged lawmakers to change the law to require states to try to identify voters “who are ineligible to vote for any reason” — a change that could significantly expand the scope of voter removal.

“There are many circumstances in which a person may not be eligible to vote,” Morley told lawmakers, such as not being a citizen or moving out of state.

Morley also raised the prospect of Congress mandating that state elections officials receive information from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system, a powerful search tool originally created to check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits. The Trump administration transformed SAVE into a citizenship verification program.

The Department of Homeland Security is encouraging states to upload their voter rolls to SAVE after the agency linked the program to Social Security data in May.

“This committee could consider requiring states to contract to receive information from the SAVE database or potentially even other databases, provided that there are other agencies with citizenship information that could be shared with states,” Morley said.

Some state election officials in the Democratic Party oppose the exploit of SAVE, citing concerns about the possibility of residents’ personal information being shared with other agencies. Unredacted voter rolls often include driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

On December 1, twelve secretaries of state provided federal public comment sharply criticizing the implementation of SAVE. Changes to SAVE are “likely to weaken, not strengthen, state efforts to ensure free, fair and secure elections,” they wrote.

“This is again part of a pattern of power grabs in terms of controlling our elections,” Minnesota Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon told Stateline earlier this month.

Many Republican secretaries of state have urged the Trump administration to implement changes to SAVE. A handful of GOP states also sued the Department of Homeland Security last year, maintaining that the Biden administration did not do enough to assist states identify ineligible voters; these states – Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio – reached an agreement with the Trump administration at the end of November.

“Accurate and up-to-date voter rolls are essential to ensuring safe, transparent and accessible elections,” Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, a Republican, said in a November news release announcing her state would soon begin using SAVE.

He worries about “overzealous” purges

On Wednesday, Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, cautioned lawmakers against engaging in “overzealous” voter purges.

Current law, she testified during a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives, includes protections against hasty expulsions of voters made in error. For example, the NVRA establishes a 90-day “quiet period” before federal elections that prevents election officials from systematically removing ineligible voters during that period.

“This prevents last-minute purges where voters discover they have been purged and come back into the game in time to throw the ball that counts,” Lakin testified.

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said Americans too often have to jump through unnecessary barriers to vote. She said conspiracy theories and misinformation about the election have spurred state-level legislation that makes it more tough to vote.

“NVRA is a key piece of our federal voting legislation,” Sewell said, “it provides voters with the access and protections they need, as well as guardrails for election officials to conduct voter preservation.”

Jonathan Shorman of Stateline can be reached at: jshorman@stateline.org.