A recent hearing by the House Subcommittee on Elections revealed a deep partisan divide over Trump’s executive order on election integrity and the SAVE Act.
President Donald Trump’s recent executive order titled “The Preserving and Protecting of the Integrity of American Elections” and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) were the topics at an April 8 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Elections.
The SAVE Act passed the House of Representatives 220–208 two days after the hearing. It requires people to register to vote or update their registration information to present proof of citizenship.
The bill now moves on to the Senate.
Trump’s executive order called out what he described as America’s continued failure to “enforce basic and necessary protections” to ensure free and fair elections.
The order contends that states have failed to adequately vet voters’ citizenship and that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden failed to devote sufficient resources to the enforcement of the existing statutes.
The order also alleges that the prior administration actively prevented states from removing aliens from their voter lists.
“It is the policy of my administration to enforce federal law and to protect the integrity of our election process,” Trump said in the order.
Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a witness at the hearing, told the committee that Trump’s executive order was “a good first step” and that states needed more access to data to determine a person’s immigration status.
LaRose noted that his office filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last year. The state demanded that the DHS provide access to U.S. citizenship records, which the lawsuit argued have been unlawfully withheld.
“That lawsuit is ongoing, but I hope that, with the new administration, states will soon be able to proactively verify the citizenship status of every registered voter on their rolls,” he said.
Trump’s order requires Attorney General Pam Bondi to engage in “information-sharing agreements” with the states to provide the Justice Department with details on all suspected violations of federal and state election laws.
Witness Wes Allen, the Republican secretary of state of Alabama, said: “My efforts to gain access to noncitizen data held by the United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) were repeatedly denied by the previous administration.”
Allen said that “batch comparisons of DHS noncitizen data to our state-level voter files” will facilitate the “immediate removal of those who are illegally registered to vote.”
By Steven Kovac
