Trump and GOP push for aggressive voter roll purges up until Election Day, testing precedent

Source: CNN Politics

PUBLISHED May 4, 2026, 4:00 AM ET


For decades, it’s generally been assumed that any mass purges of voter rolls had to be completed at least 90 days out from an election. But Republicans and the Trump administration are now testing the scope of the federal law that imposes that ban on “systematic” removal programs within three months of an election, as President Donald Trump pushes for more aggressive reviews of voter rolls for non-citizens and other ineligible voters. The Justice Department has launched a sprawling effort to obtain nearly every state’s voter registration file and to review those files for suspected non-citizens.

For its review, the DOJ is using a federal immigration database tool known as SAVE – or the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – which has shown itself prone to produce false positives. Some state election officials have indicated they want the freedom to remove names in the months or weeks before an election, but other election officials – along with voter advocates – are concerned that eligible voters are at risk of being disenfranchised with the ramp up in the purge programs, especially as Trump tries to get more involved. They say that the so-called “quiet period” is needed to give eligible voters who are mistakenly caught up in such removals adequate time to get back on the rolls.

Trump and top officials in his administration been relentless in their claims that a flood of foreigners on the voter rolls have polluted elections, even though studies have shown non-citizen voting to be very rare. That the Trump administration is attempting to insert the federal government more directly in the voting process makes the Republicans’ legal arguments about the quiet period “more concerning,” said Brent Ferguson, the senior director of strategic litigation at Campaign Legal Center, which has successfully sued states for violating the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day “quiet period.”

“It sets up a situation where the federal government itself is the actor trying to purge voters from the rolls in the days before the election, which is clearly illegal,” Ferguson said. An appeals court ruled in 2014 that Florida could not use the SAVE data system to purge its rolls within 90 days of the election because of the quiet period provision in the NVRA. The Trump administration and Republicans argue that the ban does not apply to purges aimed at non-citizens and other people who should have never been registered in the first place.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/04/politics/voter-roll-purges-election-day

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H.R.2 - National Voter Registration Act of 1993

This was also dubbed the "Motor Voter Act", enacted under President Bill Clinton.

This is the section that the 45 administration and red states openly intend on violating (from pg. 8 of the law text) -