Big takeover
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"These people were brought to our country to vote. And they vote illegally. And the — you know, amazing that the Republicans aren't tougher on it. The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting."
- Donald Trump, Dan Bongino Show, February 2, 2026
In coordination with the Trump administration, Texas last year flagged thousands of registered voters as potentially ineligible and kicked them off the rolls. It turns out that many were wrongfully disenfranchised, and that all of them were targeted because of their immigration background.
This purge, and others like it taking place across the country, is the result of more than a decade of Trump falsely claiming that immigrants are illegally voting with the help of Democrats. It’s also made possible by the failure of Democrats to take action on voting rights and immigration when they had the power to do so.
More ominously, it serves as a blueprint for a much larger national clampdown that seeks to stop naturalized citizens from voting and frighten eligible immigrants from registering. Trump knows he’s likely to lose the midterms. Knocking out a constituency that tends to vote for Democrats is his best bet for holding on to power.
It turns out that the guy trying to scare us about immigrants stealing elections is trying to steal the election by scaring immigrants.
In May of 2025, the Trump administration began demanding that state governments turn over unredacted voter registration databases, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers –– from every state and Washington, D.C.
They claimed state voter rolls were needed, in part, to verify voters’ eligibility and prevent noncitizens from casting ballots in federal elections. That’s even though both the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, an organization that advocates for voting rights and campaign finance reform, and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, found that noncitizens have cast roughly 0.0001% of all ballots in recent elections.
Most states refused this unprecedented, unconstitutional request, and the administration’s efforts to sue them into compliance have largely failed in federal court. But Texas and a dozen other states chose to hand their full voter data to the
Department of Homeland Security for vetting through its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system.
Nearly 3,000 Texans were flagged as non-citizens and removed from the state’s voter rolls. The problem is that the SAVE database contains outdated information, and many naturalized citizens were mistakenly flagged as noncitizens.
While some responded to their removal by providing proof of citizenship and were able to restore their right to vote, it wasn’t until voting rights groups in Texas sued, reporters exposed the flaws in the state’s data, and county registrars pushed back that the Texas elections director ordered counties to comprehensively reinstate voters who had been wrongly removed.
You’d think Texas would have learned something from the last time they tried this.
In January 2019, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley announced that he had a list of nearly 100,000 registered voters who were actually noncitizens and ineligible to vote. The claim came weeks after Texas Democrats had blown past expectations in the 2018 elections, winning two long-shot congressional races, 12 State House seats, and electing 19 Black women to district and county courts in Houston.
The Texans on that list were mailed letters notifying them that they’d been flagged as potential noncitizens. To contest the finding, they had to send a copy of their birth certificate, their passport or their naturalization documents to their county registrar. Those who didn’t respond within 30 days were removed from the voting rolls.
It turned out, however, that the list of illegal voters had been compiled from old driver’s license records that didn’t reflect the status of Texans who had since naturalized. As in the current case, the error only came to light because voting rights organizations sued the state to stop it.
In February 2019, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered Texas to stop the voter purges and the citizenship demand letters, citing the state’s bungled vetting process and lack of proof of noncitizen voting. Biery called the attempted purge “a solution looking for a problem.”
Even with good intentions, he wrote, “the road to a solution was inherently paved with flawed results, meaning perfectly legal naturalized Americans were burdened with what the Court finds to be ham-handed and threatening correspondence from the state which did not politely ask for information but rather exemplifies the power of government to strike fear and anxiety and to intimidate the least powerful among us.” He argued that the effort conflated immigration with illegal voting, adding, “No native born Americans were subjected to such treatment.”
We may never know how many naturalized citizens managed to get their voting rights restored and how many decided it wasn’t worth tangling with a government that had demanded they prove their citizenship before they could vote again.
Great-great-grandfather Bernard O’Rourke became a U.S. citizen in 1868.
But we do know that interfering in elections by purging legally registered naturalized immigrants will continue. Already states like Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina have employed similar tactics to those used in Texas, with similar results.
In Alabama officials purged 3,251 voters “by cross-checking the voter rolls with a database of people who had been issued noncitizen identification numbers from the Department of Homeland Security” and then later admitted that at least 2,000 of them were in fact legally registered to vote.
But Trump won’t be able to affect the November outcome relying on state-by-state efforts. So he’s now using all the leverage he has to push through the SAVE Act in Congress, which, if it becomes law, will mandate the cross-referencing of all state voter files against these flawed federal databases that have already produced so many wrongful voter purges in states like Texas.
Even if those who are wrongfully flagged eventually get reinstated, that might come too late for them to actually vote in November. And the consequences extend beyond the eligible voters who will lose their ability to participate in these elections. If the SAVE Act passes, it could also appear to legitimize the president’s false claims that immigrants are illegally voting, undermining trust in elections and preparing the ground for him to challenge Republican losses during the upcoming midterms.
The SAVE Act would make Texas’s approach the law everywhere, mandating the same flawed database checks in every state, with far less room for the kind of scrutiny that stopped this most recent purge before it went further.
Congress still has a chance to block it. If it doesn’t, the next purge will be big enough to change the outcome of elections across the country. More than 20 million naturalized citizens are currently eligible to vote — how many will be turned away if Trump succeeds?
Even if he can’t get the SAVE Act through, Trump will continue to lie about immigrants and voting to undermine faith in elections that his party is almost certain to lose. He has repeatedly used the specter of noncitizen voting to explain his losses and justify his attempt to nationalize federal elections. He claimed he would have won the popular vote in 2016 had 5 million illegal immigrants not voted. Earlier this summer he alleged that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in just four states where Democrats are in charge.
That’s why Democrats need clear, decisive wins at every level, strong enough to withstand the president’s efforts to interfere. We must register and turn out enough new voters to make up for those who will be wrongfully purged from the rolls as we also seek out those who should have their voting rights reinstated. In Texas, I volunteer with Powered by People whose members personally meet and register those most targeted for voter suppression — including naturalized citizens — to help them vote and to help restore their voting rights when they are wrongfully purged.
And when Democrats achieve these overwhelming victories, they must use their newly won power to protect voting rights and fix the underlying challenges that Trump is so successfully exploiting.
That means passing voting rights legislation modeled on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which helped ensure that Black Americans could finally register and vote after decades of being locked out of elections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, languishing in legislative purgatory since 2015, would restore much of what’s been gutted from the original VRA by the Supreme Court and extend its protections to communities, including naturalized citizens, who now face a new kind of Jim Crow.
But it also means ending the talk of rewriting our immigration laws and actually burning the political capital once in office to do it. Presidents Obama and Biden both enjoyed Congressional majorities in their first two years in office. While they used that power to win impressive victories on healthcare, Covid response and climate change, immigration was left undone. That created a political opening for Trump, who blamed Democrats for failing to address the issue and used it to push his lies that undocumented immigrants threatened the country and were trying to steal elections.
If they win majorities in November and the White House in 2028, Democrats should embrace the opportunity to legalize the status of those Americans who’ve earned the chance to come out of the shadows, and provide a safe, orderly and legal path for new immigrants to join their families, flee persecution and contribute to the greatness of this country. That would do more than anything else to secure the border, regularize immigration and end the ICE terror campaigns in our communities. Americans don’t hate immigrants, they hate the chaos, confusion and cruelty of the status quo.
Trump won twice by demonizing immigrants in the wake of Democratic inaction. He is now trying to use the lie that immigrants are committing voter fraud to disenfranchise new citizens and create doubt about November’s election. We can fight back by working to ensure that every eligible citizen, naturalized or native-born, can vote. And then use the hard-won political power their votes make possible to deliver an immigration system worthy of this country.
That’s how we make good on the promise of a government of, by and for the people – all of them.
Thank you,
