President Trump is trying to create individual lists of citizens by state to determine who can vote, even as his administration acknowledges they would be unreliable.
President Trump is seeking to create state-by-state citizenship lists, saying they are necessary to block noncitizens from voting, a virtually nonexistent issue that the president has described as widespread despite his own administration’s inability to substantiate the claim.
“I think this will help a lot with elections,” Mr. Trump said in March before signing an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of citizens in each state that could be used to help determine voter eligibility.
Mr. Trump has been pursuing similar policies since his first term. In 2019, he called on the government to compile citizenship data after a failed attempt to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
More recently, the president has championed a strict voter identification bill, now stalled in the Senate, which called on states to use federal databases to identify noncitizens.
Democratic-led states and voting rights groups have sued to block the executive order on a number of grounds, including that the Constitution does not grant the executive branch explicit authority over elections.
During a recent hearing in Federal District Court in Washington in a lawsuit challenging the order, the Justice Department acknowledged the lists would likely be unreliable for determining voter eligibility.