Trump's midterm playbook: lawsuits, a glitchy database and a lot of fear

The White House is pushing hard to reshape who gets to vote before the 2026 midterms — and so far, courts keep slamming the door. President Donald Trump has leaned on federal agencies, lawsuits and a sprawling citizenship database to tighten election rules, according to France 24. The result, voting-rights advocates say, is less a new legal landscape than a cloud of dread hanging over November.

At the center of the fight sits the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would force voters to show documentary proof of US citizenship. The bill cleared the House in February, then stalled in the Senate. Acceptable IDs would include a passport, military ID or birth certificate matching a voter's current name — a snag for the roughly 69 million women who changed names after marriage, and for trans voters. The Campaign Legal Center says more than 21 million Americans, nearly 10 percent of voting-age adults, have no such paperwork handy. A 2024 study found 3 percent of people of color lack citizenship documents, against 1 percent of white Americans.

Then there's the database. The administration expanded Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, known as SAVE, so states could check voter eligibility. At least 25 states opted in and the system scanned 67 million registrations before a district judge blocked it in June over privacy worries. The Supreme Court lifted that block in September. The catch: SAVE leans on old immigration records, so it flags people who later naturalized. In Travis County, Texas, 97 people flagged as noncitizens turned out to include US nationals — 10 percent of them, possibly as high as 21 percent, per the AP. Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center called the system “incredibly unreliable” for verifying anyone's citizenship, especially naturalized citizens.

The Justice Department has taken the courtroom route too. In mid-October it said it charged 113 people across 20 states with voting or registration offenses over seven weeks, after earlier announcing roughly 90 election-misconduct charges in 2026 — 50 of them suspected noncitizen voters. One target, 42-year-old Jose Antonio Banuelos-Diaz, has lived in the US for 40 years and was accused of trying to register in 2007, around a driver's license application. He denies it and told AP he has never voted because he knows he can't. He was released but faces five years if convicted.

Trump also sued California to stop officials from counting some 20,000 mail-in ballots he claims came from noncitizens. A federal judge let the count proceed, saying the request “violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections.” California officials said half the names on the government's list were US-born citizens, and the rest couldn't be verified with the data provided. Separately, the Justice Department demanded unredacted voter rolls from nearly every state; at least 30 states and DC got sued, 26 of those suits were dismissed, and at least 16 states handed lists over or promised to.