Trump administration takes another swing at California over voter fraud claims

Background. The administration of U.S. elections has historically been a shared but contested responsibility between federal and state governments. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution grants states primary authority to regulate the "Times, Places and Manner" of congressional elections, while Congress retains override power. This federal–state tension has shaped voting law for over two centuries.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), sometimes called the "Motor Voter" law, established federal standards for voter registration and placed significant restrictions on how and when states may remove voters from rolls. It requires that list-maintenance procedures be uniform, nondiscriminatory, and completed no later than 90 days before a federal election — a provision that has been central to litigation over last-minute purges.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) further standardized election administration after the disputed 2000 presidential election, requiring states to maintain computerized statewide voter registration lists and to verify registrant information against state and federal databases, including the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE system.

Noncitizen voting has been federally prohibited since 1996 under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which made it a deportable offense. However, documented instances of noncitizens actually casting ballots in federal elections have been found to be extremely rare in post-election audits and academic studies.

Voter roll purges — the removal of ineligible voters from registration lists — have a long and contested legal history. The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute upheld Ohio's practice of removing voters who had not voted in two years and failed to respond to a notice, while critics argued such practices disproportionately affect minority and low-income voters. Courts have repeatedly struck down purges conducted too close to elections or based on unreliable data matching.

The use of database cross-matching to identify potentially ineligible voters has been criticized by election administrators and researchers for high rates of false positives, particularly when common names or data-entry errors cause mismatches across government databases.