The refusing states keep winning in court. But is that enough to prevent election theft?
| Christopher Armitage Jul 5, 2026 |
U.S. President Donald Trump sits at his desk, behind a hat that reads “America is back” at the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 2026. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Eighteen states have turned their complete voter files over to the Trump Justice Department, including the driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers of every registered voter in them. That count comes from Protect Democracy, which names all eighteen; Texas, Florida, and Ohio are among them. Together those eighteen states have 148 US House seats, 36 US Senate seats, and 184 electoral college votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The question in the headline has an answer, and it is fewer than eighteen.
Since early 2025, the Trump administration has been trying to take control of voter rolls, mail ballots, and registration rules away from the states and hand it to the federal executive branch.
A March 2025 executive order demanded changes to state voting procedures and ordered federal election money withheld from states that refused. Courts blocked parts of it, and on June 24, 2026, a federal judge permanently barred key provisions. The Justice Department demanded voter registration data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a database called SAVE so states could submit their voter rolls to it for citizenship checks.
A second executive order, issued March 31, 2026, ordered federal agencies to build lists of United States citizens and send them to the states before every election, ordered the Postal Service to create a list of approved mail voters, and told the Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots from anyone not on that list.
DHS has also written new grant conditions, obtained by CNN and expected to go out to the states, that would make states change their election procedures and run their full voter rolls through SAVE to receive homeland security grants from a program worth more than one billion dollars this fiscal year. States that refuse would lose 20 percent of the money. As of this writing DHS has not formally announced the conditions. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said that cutting the funds of refusing states “endangers American lives and democracy itself.”
Most states said no. The Justice Department answered with 31 federal lawsuits against 30 states plus Washington DC to force the data handover, and so far no court, trial or appellate, has ruled in the department’s favor. On June 22, a federal judge ruled that the rebuilt SAVE system broke three federal laws: the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. That judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, wrote that the federal government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.” Two days later, the Sixth Circuit became the first appeals court to rule on the data lawsuits, upholding the dismissal of the case against Michigan. And on June 25, a federal judge in Boston blocked the core of the mail voting order for the November 2026 election in a lawsuit brought by 23 Democratic-led states and DC. The judge, Indira Talwani, wrote that “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
News stories about these rulings count the states that refused and the rulings the administration lost. Every one of those stories is accurate. They still measure the wrong thing, because a count of refusing states only means something if each state’s choice stays inside that state’s borders. It does not, for two reasons.
The first reason: once voter data leaves a state, the federal government keeps it, and every new state adds to the same federal database. That database works as soon as one state hands over its records, no matter how many others refuse.
Twelve of the eighteen had handed over complete files, driver’s license and Social Security numbers included, by early April; the other six complied partly or later. Texas alone accounts for a large share of the affected voters: it signed an agreement with DHS in March 2025 and ran its more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE. Separately, the DHS agency that handles citizenship began building a registry that combines its own records with data from the Social Security Administration and the State Department.
The Justice Department also asked states to sign a confidential agreement along with the data handover. Under its reported terms, a state that signs agrees to remove any voter the department flags as ineligible within 45 days. Two states signed: Alaska and Texas. Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee handed over their rolls but refused to sign. A state that signs has given the federal executive branch ongoing control of its voter roll.
A court ruling issued after a transfer does not bring the data back. On May 12, 2026, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a written opinion saying federal law lets the Attorney General force states to produce their voter lists and share them with DHS. Losing individual court cases does not erase that opinion.
The second reason is geography. Control of the House and Senate will be decided in a small number of competitive districts and states, and several cooperating states hold those races, including Texas, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina. At least 25 states have run their rolls through SAVE since April 2025, 60 million registrations in a year, plus another 7.4 million from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board.
The court wins protect mostly the governments that sued. The June 25 injunction covers the 23 suing states and DC, and the administration told the courts this week that it is moving ahead with the system in the remaining states. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate on June 24 that under the proposed rule the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not send their voter lists to the federal government. A voter in Houston or Columbus gets nothing from the injunction, because that voter’s state government joined the federal programs instead of fighting them. One ruling reaches further: in a separate case brought by the NAACP, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan found the plan to deliver ballots only to preapproved voters broke a 2021 agreement with the Postal Service, and his ruling applies nationwide. That ruling protects ballot delivery. It does not touch the data collection, the purge agreements, or the state purge laws. So the court protection concentrates in states whose governments already refused to cooperate. In the cooperating states that hold the races deciding control of Congress, only the ballot delivery ruling applies.
The 60 million registration checks flagged about 24,000 possible noncitizens, and officials also flagged several hundred thousand registrations of people who may have died. Those totals only show how many people the government has flagged so far. It can flag as many as it chooses, and no one has to prove a flagged voter is ineligible before the registration is canceled; the voter has to prove they are eligible. That arrangement is a devastatingly powerful voter disenfranchisement tool.
In Texas, flagged voters got a letter, and if the county heard nothing within 30 days, the registration was canceled; some who did answer turned out to be citizens. A new Ohio law makes local election boards promptly cancel the registrations of people the secretary of state flags as noncitizens in checks he must run at least monthly. That secretary, Frank LaRose, defends the law on the ground that flagged voters can “immediately restore their registration status” by showing proof of citizenship.
The system also discourages people from registering at all, separate from the cancellations. A federal official confirmed that people flagged by SAVE are referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and the judge who reviewed the system wrote that a centralized federal database like this would discourage registration because citizens could fear misuse of their personal information. In races decided by hundreds or a few thousand votes, losing voters from only one side, and mostly from one party, can change the result even when the national numbers stay small.
The administration has also arranged its litigation so that losing in court still produces something useful. After losing the voter data cases in California, Michigan, and Oregon, the Justice Department filed emergency appeals warning that the security and sanctity of elections in those states would be questioned without quick rulings, and its filings say that without a final court decision there is “no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026.”
Stated plainly, months before the election, the department put into official court documents the claim that results in refusing states should be treated as doubtful. If a state cooperates, the government gets its data and a purge process. If a state refuses, the government gets a written reason to challenge that state’s results in November. Either way, the administration gains something it can use. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said of the department’s conduct, “There’s so much lawyering from the DOJ here that is raising ethical questions.”
The same approach is underway with the mail voting order. Within a week of the June 25 injunction, the administration appealed to the First Circuit, asked the district judge to lift her order by July 6, and warned in its filings that the injunction will make it impossible for the Postal Service to build the new ballot delivery system before November even if the administration wins the appeal. Those filings put in writing, ahead of time, a federal reason to call November mail ballots compromised.
The effort does not stop at voter rolls. The FBI has seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, and the Arizona Senate complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records from its Maricopa County audit. The department wants records from Wayne County, Michigan, about the 2024 election, and the names of every person who worked as an election worker in Fulton County in 2020. The March 2026 order tells the Justice Department to make investigating and prosecuting election officials a priority when those officials give ballots to people the federal government considers ineligible.
Collecting the names of individual election workers and threatening officials with prosecution discourages people from doing that work whether or not charges are ever filed.
President Trump is also pressing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would make people show citizenship papers to register, limit mail voting to reasons such as illness, disability, military deployment, and travel, and make states submit their voter rolls to DHS and remove anyone the system flags. In March he said of the bill, “It will guarantee the midterms.”
Between June 22 and June 29, federal courts ruled the SAVE overhaul unlawful, permanently barred parts of the 2025 executive order, upheld the dismissal of the Michigan data case on appeal, blocked the mail voting order for 23 states and DC, and upheld Mississippi’s ballot deadline law at the Supreme Court. Those rulings stop specific legal mechanisms.
They do not bring back data already handed over, automatically restore wrongly canceled registrations, reassure naturalized citizens who now connect registering with a federal investigation, protect election workers whose names have been demanded, erase the department’s written claims that elections in refusing states cannot be presumed fair, or stop the grant conditions waiting to go out.
So, how many states is enough? To steal an election, the infrastructure needs only three things: enough voter data, cooperation from states that hold the competitive races, and an official reason to dispute the results everywhere else. Texas alone supplied the first two: 18 million records handed over, a signature on the 45 day removal agreement, citizens with canceled registrations, and competitive House seats inside its borders. The Justice Department’s own court filings supplied the third. The answer is one, and it has already happened.
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