Federalize elections: Supreme Court OKs Trump’s national voter database
With the OK of the Supreme Court, Donald Trump’s desire to federalize elections is one step closer to reality now that high court has decided he can proceed with his plan to use the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build a national voter database.
Specifically, the Supreme Court authorized Trump to overhaul a federal immigration database into a vast, centralized, and deeply flawed voter database using the personal information of Americans to initiate registration purges (via Democracy Docket):
The decision lets the administration move forward with a key provision of President Donald Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order, much of which courts have permanently blocked.
At least five of the Court’s Republican-appointed justices lifted a lower-court order that found the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) modification and use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The decision Friday marks a significant loss to voters — particularly naturalized citizens, who have been disproportionately falsely flagged as ineligible voters when states have fed their registration lists into SAVE.
It also deals a blow to voting and privacy groups challenging DHS’s overhaul of SAVE as a violation of federal privacy laws and an unconstitutional attempt to usurp states’ authority over elections.
SAVE has existed for decades as a tool that lets states check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits. However, in [his] 2025 executive order, Trump directed DHS to transform the database into a sweeping tool to vet state voter rolls.
The modifications to SAVE that Trump demanded included incorporating huge amounts of Americans’ personal data — including from the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of State and other agencies across the federal government — into the system. In her dissent, Justis Jackson said the inclusion of Social Security numbers in the modified SAVE system explicitly violated confidentiality requirements in the law that created the SSA. (Emphasis mine)
As I wrote back in June, the “SAVE” part of this discussion is a direct reference to legislation Trump and the Republican Party have been unable to pass known as the SAVE Act (now called the SAVE America Act). So, Trump played his “pen and phone” card (ala Barack Obama) to issue an executive order to nationalize elections and build a national voter database as an end run around Congress for failing to do as he wishes.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — and its SAVE America Act counterpart — is being pimped by the likes of “conservatives” like Sen. Mike Lee as the answer to keeping illegal immigrants from voting in US elections. However, what this defender of liberty (sarcasm) conveniently leaves out is how the SAVE Act is really designed to use the immigration problem to nationalize elections and expand the surveillance state.
Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to see elections nationalized and placed under Republican (i.e. his) control. In a radio interview on The Dan Bongino Show back in February, Trump called voting in America “corrupt” and claimed that since previous elections had been stolen from him, Republicans should take over how ballots are cast and counted:
“These people (illegal immigrants) were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally. Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it.
“The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” (Emphasis mine)
In addition to using illegal immigration to build a voter database and nationalize elections, Trump has been using the issue as an excuse to build his Project 2025-inspired police state. The very next day following Trump’s February declaration, Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast that ICE agents would be dispatched to select polling stations to prevent future elections from being stolen (via Democracy Docket):
Steve Bannon said that the federal government is planning to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to patrol polling stations during this year’s midterm elections.
“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon, a former senior advisor to President Donald Trump and still a figure of influence in the administration, said on Tuesday’s episode of his War Room podcast addressing Democrats. “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.” (Emphasis mine)
By the way, it should be noted here that federal control of elections actually started with Barack Obama, one of the Founding Fathers of America’s Police State that includes, in addition to Obama: George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. During his presidency, Obama suggested using the Department of Homeland Security to “monitor” voting systems, and in August 2016, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson ran with the idea using the catch-all phrase “critical infrastructure” to justify allowing the Feds to seize control of our elections.
“We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is political infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid. There’s a vital national interest in our process, so I do think we need to consider whether it should be considered by my department and others as critical infrastructure.” (Emphasis mine)
Johnson also expressed his concern at the time that our voting system wasn’t centralized, saying that “there’s no one federal election system.”
As I documented in my book The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, Republicans and Democrats in every branch of government are working to destroy freedom in America.
For example, in the aftermath of the 2018 midterms where Democrats won the most seats in a midterm since Watergate, Nancy Pelosi and crew used their new majority in the House to pass the first incarnation of the “For the People Act” (H.R. 1), a bill they claimed would “expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and for other purposes.” (Emphasis mine)
Those “other purposes” included nationalizing elections — they used the phrase “federalizing elections” — and would have ultimately empowered Republicans and Democrats in Congress to seize full control of elections from the people, as we saw in this summary of the bill:
This bill addresses voter access, election integrity, election security, political spending, and ethics for the three branches of government.
The bill also sets forth provisions related to election security, including sharing intelligence information with state election officials, protecting the security of the voter rolls, supporting states in securing their election systems, developing a national strategy to protect the security and integrity of U.S. democratic institutions, establishing in the legislative branch the National Commission to Protect United States Democratic Institutions, and other provisions to improve the cybersecurity of election systems. (Emphasis mine)
The For the People Act never became law, but the spirit behind it lives on in the Age of Trump. Even though Trumpist Republicans opposed H.R. 1 — calling it one of “the biggest power grabs in history” — they are now willing to support such a power grab if it means pleasing Dear Leader and making our elections “free and fair” (via The Hill):
“What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters.
“We need constant improvement on that front. I don’t know what the ultimate solution is going to be.” (Emphasis mine)
And let’s not forget the Supreme Court’s role in the war on liberty following their OK of Trump’s national voter database. As John Whitehead wrote earlier this month, SCOTUS will not save liberty in America.
We don’t know how many states will participate with Trump’s plan to federalize elections, although it’s a good bet that many, if not all, Republican-led states will do so (see Florida). Still, the writing is on the wall: Donald Trump is now free to pursue his plans to build a national voter database and federalize elections.
The end of our Republic is at hand.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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