State election officials may soon use a controversial U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database to trim voter registration lists.

Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security in November to grant the state access to the systematic alien verification for entitlements or SAVE program. The system compiles information from federal immigration-related databases and was originally intended as a tool to verify eligibility for certain state and federal benefits. 

More recently, the program has become a centerpiece in the Trump administration’s efforts to extend federal oversight of elections administration.  

An executive order signed in March 2025 introduced sweeping reforms to election procedures, including a mandate that state election officials review citizenship documents when registering voters. A federal court blocked the documentation requirement, noting that election procedures are the domain of state governments, not the executive branch.  

Other aspects of the executive order, including a mandate that states turn over voter registration databases for federal review, continue to play out in the courtroom. The Department of Justice has sued 21 states that refused to comply with the request. 

During a recent federal court hearing, Eric Neff, acting chief of the Department of Justice’s Voting Section, named Montana as one of 11 states that has expressed “a willingness to comply” with the Trump administration’s request to access voter data and remove allegedly ineligible voters from voter rolls. 

While Neff’s testimony did not name the SAVE program, voting rights groups and elections experts have found it difficult to disentangle the program from the Trump administration’s attempts to access voter data.  

The same March executive order that mandated states provide copies of their voter rolls requested that the Department of Homeland Security provide states with “access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.” In September, the Department of Justice confirmed that it is sharing voter data that some Republican-led states voluntarily provided with the Department of Homeland of Security. 

The Montana Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to questions about how the state planned to use the system.  Flathead County elections officials directed questions about the system to the Secretary of State’s Office. 

“All Montanans should be concerned about big government and Big Brother collecting all sorts of sensitive information, and that’s essentially what this is doing,” said Alex Rate, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana.     

Over the past year, the federal government has overhauled the SAVE system to optimize it as a voter verification tool for state election officials. Recently added functions allow users to search the system using Social Security and passport numbers, and the department has proposed plans to incorporate driver’s license and motor vehicle data into the system. Data in the program is retained for 10 years. 

The recent alterations to the SAVE program have drawn the criticism of the American Civil Liberties Union and other data privacy groups that argue the collection and consolidation of sensitive identifying information goes against federal privacy laws. The national and state branches of the American Civil Liberties Union are providing representation for plaintiffs in many of the lawsuits arising from the Department of Justice’s demand to view state voter data, including federal cases in Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Minnesota, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maine, Maryland, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia. 

Rate said such requests are especially troubling as there is little evidence of the sort of widespread voter fraud that the Trump administration claims the new voter verification program will help prevent. 

In Montana, two people were accused of illegally casting ballots in a 2021 mayoral race in Phillips County. Both women had work visas but were not citizens of the United States. Their votes were ultimately excluded from the election results, and the women were charged with misdemeanors for deceptive election practices.   

A database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lists only two other instances of election fraud in Montana. One case involved a man who submitted an absentee ballot in his ex-wife's name without her permission. The other case involved a man who filled in a voter registration form with incorrect information, including the identification number of another Montana voter. 

Two dozen states had used the SAVE program to verify voter lists as of Aug. 26. About 0.04% of voters on that list were determined to not be United States citizens, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.    

When Texas officials ran that state's voter lists through the system earlier this year,  2,724 people were identified as “potential noncitizens.” At least some of them — which represented 0.015% of the 18 million records reviewed — were mistakenly flagged as non-citizens due to out-of-date Social Security information, name changes or other systematic errors. 

Those flagged as non-citizens were given 30 days to provide proof of citizenship and reinstate their voter status. But Rate said many people may not have quick access to the necessary documents. Others may struggle to find transportation to far-flung elections offices or miss the notice that their voter registration has been rescinded.  

“When you start implementing more and more of these types of bureaucratic hurdles, then it becomes death by a thousand papercuts and people are just going to stay at home rather than exercising their fundamental right to vote,” said Rate. 

THE STATE’S adoption of the SAVE program dovetails with primarily Republican-led efforts to tighten Montana’s voting process. During the 2025 state legislative session, Rep. Braxton Mitchell, R-Columbia Falls, sponsored a bill that mandated voters write their birth year on their ballots. Mitchell argued the addition would help “help prevent fraud, reduce clerical errors and ensure that every legally cast vote is counted correctly.” 

The new law spurred widespread increases in the number of ballots rejected during the 2025 election cycle, and counties across the state spent more than $2,600 sending letters to voters that had had their ballots rejected due to an incorrect or absent birth year. 

Other bills narrowed the window in which Montanans can register to vote ahead of federal elections and imposed more strict state residency requirements. 

Reporter Hailey Smalley can be reached at 758-4433 or [email protected].