When President Donald Trump signed an expanding electoral executive order this week, he established his administration for a long struggle for the documentary proof of citizenship, the power of the Executive Branch and the existing federal law of the Federal Law.
But in a last part of the order, he also established the efficiency department of the Government of Elon Musk in his next mission: the electoral fraud hunt.
The order orders the Department of National Security to join with Doge to review the “voter registration list publicly available from the states and the records available on maintenance activities of the voter list”, and compare them with federal and state records In search of electoral fraud committed by non -citizens, which is illegally and rarely occurs.
It is not a small question, and it is one that Trump is familiar. During his first term, a voting integrity commission led by the then vice president Mike Pence and the then Secretary of State of Kansas, Kris Kobach, tried to gather a national voter archive in 2017 in the search for fraud.
It did not work: 44 states and the Columbia district refused to share at least some data, according to CNN, citing privacy concerns and swinging in a federal commission that wanted to hunt through the information of the voters, despite the few evidence that the voter fraud exists.
Even Republican state officials gave burning rejections. “They can jump to the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch,” said the then Secretary of State for Mississippi, Delbert Hosemann, Republican, at that time. In the end, the commission dissolved without finding generalized fraud evidence.
It could serve as a possible warning story for Doge, since it embarks on a similar mission.
“The Pence-Kobach commission met a lot of political resistance, but also legal resistance, whether it had the power to gather a national voter archive, and the answer was no. They never obtained a decision on the courts, because enough secretaries of state said,” on my body, “he reminded Justin Levitt, a constitutional scholar in the Law School of Law.
This time, Trump seems to be interested in offering more aggressive tools to promote their search, which suggests the use of “citation when necessary and authorized by law” and, in another part of the order, which suggests that the federal government retains subsidies for the application of the law if states are not susceptible to sharing information about possible violations of the electoral law.
“I definitely see similarities, with the possibility of much more damage this time,” said Charles Stewart III, MIT professor who studies the elections. Dege warned, could end up creaking inappropriate data and producing inaccurate results claiming fraud.
“The states must publish their list of voters to the public under the NVRA, the National Voting Law Law. But the states vary in what they release, and what they release to the public makes it difficult, if not impossible, to have high quality coincidences with other databases,” he said. “Now you have fans in this business by coinciding with data.”
The comparison of data sets throughout the country that were not built to compete with data from other states or federal immigration records could lead to millions of bad items and fraud claims, he said.
“The amount of only chaos that will occur because the really terrible cross -state parties will be, I think it could be, amazing,” he said.
The White House refused to comment more about the Executive Order beyond an information sheet that it launched.
The order has led family concerns among democratic state electoral officials.
“It sounds a lot like 2017 with the Pence-Kobach Commission,” recalled Minnesota Steve Simon Secretary of State, a Democrat. “And Minnesota was one of the many states that rejected the application of data because there is private information about the people who should not be shared, who do not want to share, who did not know when they registered or recorded to vote would be shared.”
Simon said he cared about the intentions of Trump’s team, particularly after the executive order, which he could turn democracy into an obstacle career, and that he can try to “intimidate” the states to provide voter data.
Simon also pointed out the limitations of the data that demands that the law present to the public.
The voter archive that is available to the public in Minnesota would not give Doge the type of data that you would really need to review the state voter files, Simon said.
“For $ 46, you can get voters files in Minnesota, but there are many data that you don’t get with that,” he said. “Political campaigns do it all the time. He gets a year of birth, but not a date of birth. You do not get things as personal identification information. Do not get if someone registered using a driver’s license, you do not get their number of driver’s license. You do not get things like that. He gets the basics.”
Simon, who said he is considering a litigation about the executive order, is not the only one who swayed at the idea.
“It is a great violation of the privacy of our citizens to suggest that Dege or the federal government should have the right to access private information held by the States,” said Maine’s Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is also postulated for governor. “Especially when Dege has such a abysmal record of maintaining safe data.”
He added that it was particularly frustrating to see this impulse after the Trump administration reduced the funds that were to help ensure electoral cybersecurity.
“The Trump and Elon Musk administration have eliminated all funds for these real electoral security measures that really worked in 2024 in the 50 states,” he said. “This executive order is the opposite of security, since it compromises the privacy of citizens and threatens to eliminate the vital financing of the local police that would actually maintain our safe elections.”
