When President Donald Trump has signed an electric election decree this week, he set up his administration for a long fight against documentary evidence of citizenship, the power of the executive branch and the existing federal law.
But in a neglected part of the order, he also placed the Ministry of Elon Musk’s government efficiency during his next mission: hunting for electoral fraud.
The ordinance orders the Ministry of Internal Security to team up with DOGE to examine the “registration list of voters accessible to the public and the available files concerning the maintenance activities of voters” and compare them to federal and state files In search of an electoral fraud committed by non -citizens – which is illegal and rarely occurs.
It is not a little request, and it is one that Trump knows. During his first mandate, a vote of integrity of the vote led by the president of the time, Mike Pence, and the secretary of state of the Kansas, Kris Kobach, tried to bring together a file of national voter in 2017 in search of fraud.
It did not take place: 44 states and the District of Columbia refused to share at least certain data, according to CNN, citing confidentiality problems and the heating of a federal commission wishing to hunt information on voters, despite little evidence that electoral fraud exists.
Even representatives of the republican state have made inflamed refusals. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state from the launch,” Mississippi’s secretary of state said Delbert Hosemann, a republican at the time. In the end, the commission dissolved without ever finding any evidence of generalized fraud.
It could serve as a possible possible tale for Doge because it embarks on a similar mission.
“The Pence -Kobach commission has met with a pile of political resistance – but also a legal resistance – that it has the power to bring together a national voter file, and the response was no. They never obtained a decision on this subject of the courts, because enough constitutional twin at the law of Loyola which was a school of voting law which was an administration of the voting rights.
This time, Trump seems to offer his team more aggressive tools to feed his research, suggesting the use of “assignment to appear if necessary and authorized by law” and, in another part of the Order, suggesting that the federal government retains the law implementation subsidions if the States is not likely to share information on the potential violations of the electoral law.
“I really see similarities, with the possibility of much more damage this time,” said Charles Stewart III, professor at the MIT who studies the elections. DOGE, he warned, could end up cheating inadequate data and producing inaccurate results to demand fraud.
“States are required to release their voters to the public under the NVRA, the national law on the recording of voters. But the states vary in what they say and what they disclose to the public makes it difficult – if not impossible – to have high quality matches to other databases,” he said. “Now you end up with amateurs in this company by making data correspondence.”
The comparison of data sets from all over the country that was not built to behave with data from other states or federal immigration files could lead to millions of bad matches and fraud claims, he said.
“The quantity of chaos that will follow because of really terrible intermediate state matches will be, I think it could be-mind-boggling,” he said.
The White House refused to further comment on the decree beyond an information sheet it released.
The order has led to familiar concerns among officials of the democratic state elections.
“It looks a lot like 2017 with the Pence-Kobach Commission,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, Democrat. “And Minnesota has been one of the many states that refused the request of data because there is private information on people who should not be shared, that they do not want to share, that they did not know when they registered or registered to vote would be shared.”
Simon said he was worried about the Trump team’s team – in particular after the decree, which he said could transform democracy into an obstacle course – and that he could try to intimidate states by providing voters data.
Simon also noted the limits of the data he required to present by law to the public.
The voters’ file accessible to the public in Minnesota would not give DOGE the type of data he would need to really consult the files of state voters, said Simon.
“For $ 46, you can get voter files in Minnesota, but there is a lot of data that you don’t get with it,” he said. “Political campaigns do it all the time. You get a year of birth, but not the date of birth. You do not get things like personal information, identification.
Simon, who said he was considering disputes on the decree, is not the only one to bare the idea.
“It is a huge violation of the privacy of our citizens to suggest that DOGE or the federal government should have the right to access the private information held by the States,” said Shenna Bellows, Secretary of State for Maine, a Democrat who also presents himself as Governor. “Especially when DOGE has such a data security assessment.”
She added that it was particularly frustrating to see this push after the Trump administration reduced funding that helped ensure the cybersecurity of the elections.
“The Trump and Elon Musk administration have eliminated any funding for these real electoral security measures that really worked in 2024 in the 50 states,” she said. “This decree is the opposite of security in that it compromises the privacy of citizens and threatens to withdraw vital funding from the local police who would actually ensure our election in security.”
