President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered the DOGE office to assist in reviewing publicly available voter rolls.
In a lengthy executive order, Trump asked the Department of Homeland Security to work with DOGE administrator Amy Gleason “to review each State’s publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities.”
It’s unclear the extent to which DOGE would use the data. No federal official has the power to remove someone from the voter rolls.
“DOGE certainly has no power to kick people off rolls,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert and a law professor at UCLA, told Business Insider. “But they could make a lot of noise trying to claim they’ve found fraud when they find that voter registration rolls are not being kept up to date.”
The White House has repeatedly said Gleason leads the DOGE office. She recently declared in court that Elon Musk does not work for the rebranded US DOGE Service. But Musk is the de facto leader of DOGE, a point underscored by his appearance on Fox News Tuesday night with members of the DOGE team.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed over the DOGE office’s efforts to obtain sensitive and nonpublic federal data. Unlike social security data, many states make their voter lists publicly available, often for a fee.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan group that monitors state-level legislation, some states restrict access to their information.
Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election. After his 2016 victory, he repeatedly claimed without evidence that fraud prevented him from winning the popular vote. In the lead-up to the 2024 race, Republicans raised concerns about non-citizens voting in the presidential race, an occurrence that remains rare and illegal. Recent audits of voter rolls have found extremely few numbers of noncitizens registered to vote. Georgia found 20 noncitizens registered to vote out of more than 8 million registered voters in the state.
During the first Trump administration, 44 states opposed a Trump election commission’s sweeping request for voter information, according to a 2017 CNN report.
At the time, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chair of the commission, had said the data would eventually be made public.
Hasen told Business Insider said Tuesday’s EO could spark such a confrontation again.
“We will see what happens this time,” he said.
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