Trump’s election order tees up DOGE for familiar voter file fight

When President Donald Trump signed a sprawling election executive order this week, he set up his administration for a lengthy fight over documentary proof of citizenship, the power of the executive branch and existing federal election law.

But in an overlooked portion of the order, he also set Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on its next mission: hunting for voter fraud.

The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to team up with DOGE to review states’ “publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities,” and compare them against federal and state records in search of voter fraud committed by noncitizens — which is illegal and seldom occurs.

It’s not a small ask, and it’s one Trump is familiar with. During his first term, a voting integrity commission led by then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach attempted to assemble a national voter file back in 2017 in pursuit of fraud.

It didn’t pan out: 44 states and the District of Columbia refused to share at least some data, according to CNN, citing privacy concerns and balking at a federal commission wanting to hunt through voter information, despite little evidence that voter fraud exists.

Even Republican state officials gave fiery refusals. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” then-Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said at the time. In the end, the commission disbanded without ever finding proof of widespread fraud.

It could serve as a potential cautionary tale for DOGE as it embarks on a similar mission.

“The Pence-Kobach commission ran into a bunch of political resistance — but also legal resistance — whether it had the power to assemble a national voter file, and the answer was no. They never got a ruling on that from the courts, because enough secretaries of state said, ‘Over my dead body,’” recalled Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar at Loyola Law School who was a voting rights adviser to the Biden administration.

This time around, Trump seems keen on offering his team more aggressive tools to fuel its search, suggesting the use of “subpoena where necessary and authorized by law” and, in another portion of the order, suggesting that the federal government withhold law enforcement grants if states aren’t amenable to sharing information about potential election law violations.

“I definitely see similarities, with the possibility of a lot more damage this time around,” said Charles Stewart III, a professor at MIT who studies elections. DOGE, he warned, could end up crunching inadequate data and producing inaccurate results claiming fraud.

“States are required to release their voter list to the public under the NVRA, the National Voter Registration Act. But states vary in what they release, and what they release to the public makes it difficult — if not impossible — to have high-quality matches to other databases,” he said. “Now you’re left with amateurs in this business doing data matches.”

Comparing datasets from across the country that weren’t built to comport with other states’ data or federal immigration records could result in millions of bad matches and claims of fraud, he said.

“The amount of just chaos that’s going to ensue because of really terrible cross-state matches is going to be, I think could be — mind-boggling,” he said.

The White House declined to comment further on the executive order beyond a fact sheet it released.

The order has led to familiar concerns among Democratic state election officials.

“It sounds a lot like 2017 with the Pence-Kobach commission,” recalled Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat. “And Minnesota was one of many states that declined the request for data because there’s private information in there on people that shouldn’t be shared, that they don’t want shared, that they didn’t know when they signed up or registered to vote would be shared.”

Simon said he worried about the Trump’s team’s intentions — particularly after the executive order, which he said could turn democracy into an obstacle course — and that it may try to “bully” states into providing voters’ data.

Simon also noted the limitations of the data he’s required by law to present to the public.

The voter file that’s available to the public in Minnesota wouldn’t give DOGE the kind of data it would need to truly review the state’s voter files, Simon said.

“For $46 you can get voter files in Minnesota, but there’s a lot of data you don’t get with that,” he said. “Political campaigns do it all the time. You get year of birth, but not date of birth. You don’t get things like personal, identifying information. You don’t get if someone registered using a driver’s license, you don’t get their driver’s license number. You don’t get things like that. You get the basics.”

Simon, who said he’s considering litigation over the executive order, isn’t the only one balking at the idea.

“It is a huge violation of our citizens’ privacy to suggest that DOGE or the federal government should have any right to access private information held by the states,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is also running for governor. “Especially when DOGE has such an abysmal record of keeping data safe.”

She added it was particularly frustrating to see this push after the Trump administration cut funding that went to help secure election cybersecurity.

“The Trump administration and Elon Musk have eliminated all funding for these actual election security measures that really worked in 2024 in all 50 states,” she said. “This executive order is the opposite of security in that it compromises citizen privacy and threatens to take away vital local law enforcement funding that would actually keep our election safe.”