By Luc Cohen
Sept 25 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is pressing forward with an unprecedented push for his administration to obtain sensitive voter data ahead of the US midterm elections, despite repeated losses in court, in a hunt for noncitizens illegally registered to vote, though there has been no evidence of widespread fraud of this kind.
Responding to a legal challenge to a key element of Trump's plans, Justice Department lawyers are set to ask a federal judge in Maryland on Friday not to block
the Department of Homeland Security from creating lists of US citizens who are eligible to vote. Trump's fellow Republicans are fighting to keep control of Congress in the November 3 midterms.
Greenbelt, Maryland-based US District Judge Paula Xinis is holding a hearing in a lawsuit by privacy advocates seeking to block the department's plans to implement an executive order Trump signed in March. The order directed DHS to create the citizen lists using data housed throughout the federal government and share them with state election officials. Under the order, state officials could face criminal prosecution if ineligible people are found to have voted in their states.
The federal government has never previously compiled any such lists. The US Constitution assigns the administration of federal elections to individual states.
The plaintiffs argue that the DHS plan to create the lists would collect information on American citizens from other federal government entities including the Social Security Administration in ways that violate privacy laws.
Trump for years has made false claims about widespread voting fraud in the United States including his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump, who has said he is acting to protect the integrity of US elections, also has asserted that states are not doing enough to remove noncitizens and dead people from their voter rolls.
Critics have said Trump's current drive is aimed at disenfranchising eligible Democratic-leaning voters.
They note that a federal immigration database known as SAVE, which is one of the sources that Trump's executive order directs DHS to consult in building its lists of eligible voters, has mistakenly flagged as noncitizens some Americans who are naturalized US citizens and properly registered to vote. Several Republican-led states already have checked their voter rolls against SAVE.
25 LOSSES IN COURT
Most of the Trump administration's efforts to collect voter data have not succeeded.
Trump's proposed SAVE America Act, legislation that would require states to check their voter lists against the SAVE database, failed in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The Justice Department has lost 25 different lawsuits seeking to compel states to hand over their complete voter rolls, including sensitive information such as partial Social Security numbers used to identify people. And the US Supreme Court this month declined to allow his push to tighten mail-in voting, which would have required states to submit lists of eligible voters to the US Postal Service.
In a July speech, Trump said without providing evidence that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people were listed as active on voter rolls, and that he directed DHS to tell states to remove them.
"We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest," Trump said.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman said Lauren Bis said: "Despite extreme Democrats and the media claiming it never happens, the evidence of noncitizens registering and voting in our elections continues to pile up."
'MASS DISENFRANCHISEMENT'
Democrats and voting rights advocates say the administration's focus on obtaining voter data and checking for noncitizens is driven by a desire to impose obstacles on Democratic-leaning voters, rather than a genuine concern about election security.
"You can't do mass disenfranchisement without a voter file," said voting rights lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm frequently represents the Democratic Party in court.
John Hill, a lawyer at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is representing the plaintiffs challenging the DHS plans on Friday, said Trump's threat of prosecution of state officials implied that his administration would try to coerce states to use DHS's citizenship lists to purge voters.
Justice Department lawyers have told the judge that the lawsuit is premature because DHS has not yet activated the online portal through which it intends to share voter data with the states.
GLITCHES AND CLERICAL ERRORS
A Reuters review published on Wednesday found that software glitches and clerical errors in a dozen US states run by both Democrats and Republicans may have added more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens to the nation's voter rolls since 2000. Reuters was not able to determine how many of the noncitizens voted. Experts said the number was too small to impact elections.
In an example that Trump's White House has cited to argue that Democrats are wrong to suggest noncitizen voting is not a concern, New Jersey said in July that a technology glitch added 6,600 noncitizens to voter rolls in 2023 and 2024. The state said fewer than 400 of them actually voted, and that there was no evidence that the results of any elections were swayed.
State audits and independent studies have found voter fraud is very rare. A Reuters investigation published in July found that just 129 people had been prosecuted for noncitizen voting since a law criminalizing it was passed in 1996. The Justice Department charged an additional 20 people this month.
The Department of Homeland Security has obtained voter rolls from at least 47 of the 50 US states and is reviewing them to identify noncitizens who are registered, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing an internal email.
It remains unclear how many of those were redacted, public versions as opposed to a full accounting. Those public versions often lack key personal identifying information like partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver's license numbers. DHS is using information from a commercial data broker to supplement the records, though it is not clear how much personally identifying information the department now possesses.
Even if the Trump administration prevails in court in the case being heard on Friday, it is not clear whether the DHS effort to create citizenship lists would have any impact on who is eligible to vote in November. Trump's executive order directed DHS to share the lists with state election officials at least 60 days before each federal election. That would have been September 4.
In addition, a federal judge in a separate case has blocked the use of a revamped version of SAVE to check voter eligibility. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the use of the revamped SAVE database, but the justices have not yet ruled.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; editing by Amy Stevens and Will Dunham)
