An Associated Press report found the Trump administration has already run millions of voter registrations through a federal government database to determine if the registered voters are eligible to vote.
According to the AP, 67 million registrations mostly from Republican-led states have been run through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s verification program and tens of thousands of non-citizens and people who have died have been flagged.
Critics said the percentage of non-citizens and deceased individuals is a small fraction of registered voters.
As the Trump administration moves to federalize certain election functions, several states including Colorado have sued to block the administration from gaining access to voter information, citing the U.S. Constitution granting states the right to run elections.
“We know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to try to assemble essentially a database of all U.S. voters. The desire is to create new restrictive ID requirements that millions of Americans who are eligible voters do not have,” said Aly Belknap, executive director of Colorado Common Cause.
Colorado Common Cause is a nonpartisan nonprofit that describes itself as pro-democracy.
“His mail executive order is really designed around putting the federal government in control of who can and can't receive a mail ballot based on requirements set by the federal government that currently don't apply to voters, so that's where we'll see millions and millions of Americans, if this is implemented, lacking the ID that they need to vote after having been voters for decades,” Belknap said.
Belknap said the Trump administration will require a certified copy of a birth certificate or valid U.S. passport to vote.
“When I'm thinking about the people in my life, I'm thinking about my 65-year-old father, he's been voting for a very long time, and he doesn't have either of those documents,” Belknap said.
Denver Clerk and Recorder Paul López said federal involvement in elections is unnecessary and violates the constitution.
“We already have identification that's required for folks to be able to register to vote, to participate in elections,” Lopez said. “The last, you know, couple of presidential elections we've had have been the most secure elections in U.S. history. It is secure, it's safe.”
López said the federal government’s verification process is confusing voters.
“Who runs elections and who determines the outcome of elections — that's up to the states and the people, that's not up to the president. That's not up to the federal government. That's the way it always has been. That's the way that the constitutional framers intended it to be,” López said.
A new Ohio law requires local election boards to “promptly” cancel the registrations of people whom the secretary of state identifies as non-citizens during registration checks that the official is required to make at least monthly.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an email that people’s voting rights are not in danger because “all they need to do to immediately restore their registration status is show proof of citizenship.”
