DHS conditioned over $1 billion in homeland-security grants on states adopting hand-marked ballots and SAVE voter-roll checks

On June 22, 2026, CNN reported that the Trump administration had attached a new set of election-administration conditions to several Department of Homeland Security grant programs, together expected to total more than $1 billion in the current fiscal year. Under the rules, states must phase out certain electronic voting systems in favor of hand-marked paper ballots and run their full voter rolls through DHS's SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) citizenship-verification database. States that decline would lose 20% of their homeland-security grant funding — tens of millions of dollars for many states.

The grants at issue are among Washington's principal vehicles for helping state and local governments prevent terrorism, protect critical infrastructure, and prepare for major disasters. Tying that money to federally dictated changes in election procedures uses a homeland-security funding lever to reach into an area of election administration that the Constitution's Elections Clause commits primarily to the states and to Congress, not the president. No statute authorizes the executive branch to impose these election mandates as a grant condition.

State election officials condemned the plan. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told Democracy Docket that the effort "endangers American lives and democracy itself," and secretaries of state warned that forced SAVE checks produce false matches that can wrongly flag eligible voters for removal from the rolls. Voting-rights advocates noted that a federal court had separately barred the SAVE database from being used to strike voters from registration lists.