Trump Strengthens Election Integrity – Even with SAVE America Act Stalled

The Senate skipped town over the weekend after again failing to pass the SAVE America Act. But that hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump from securing America’s elections anyway through sheer force of will.

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, state election officials are paying extra close attention to their voter rolls this year – because they know the Trump administration is watching like a hawk for instances of fraud or genuine mistakes. State leaders “know that the administration’s spotlight could land on any one of them, bringing accusations that they held an invalid election,” the Journal says. While Democrats and even a few Republicans appear none too happy about the additional scrutiny, Trump’s efforts are yielding tangible results.

“I feel like I’m in a UFC chokehold,” Nevada Democrat secretary of state Francisco Aguilar told the Journal of his efforts to review his state’s voter rolls. “Everything we do has to be perfect.”

Aguilar seems to want sympathy for his supposed predicament, but he’ll find very little from American voters, who would likely respond with something along the lines of:

Do you mean you didn’t feel pressure to be perfect before when it came to ensuring that only lawful U.S. citizens cast ballots?

Or,

What do you normally feel like when it comes to protecting the integrity of our elections?

Moreover, according to government data, Aguilar has every reason to sweat. Nevada is one of four U.S. states that President Trump alleged in a primetime address last month have as many as 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls.

One of the other states on that list, New Jersey, has already come clean about its own issues with its voter rolls. Just days after Trump’s speech, Garden State Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) announced that her administration had identified an astonishing 6,600 noncitizens on its voter rolls. Of that number, at least 400 had voted.

Sherrill blamed a software glitch and was careful to note that the mistakes had happened under her predecessor, fellow Democrat Governor Phil Murphy. According to Sherrill, the noncitizens were inadvertently registered while applying for a driver’s license – part of the state’s “motor voter” program. The software company has since denied culpability, and a spokesperson for Murphy has pleaded ignorance as well.

But who exactly is to blame is beside the point. The remarkable thing about this saga is that a Democrat governor openly admitted to a major voter registration error that had allowed hundreds of noncitizens to illegally cast ballots. Until then, Democrats’ main line on election integrity had been that noncitizens voting is “extremely rare,” and that concerns about mass voter fraud are nothing but a right-wing “conspiracy theory.”

Sherrill’s admission shattered that myth – and it should be seen as a direct result of the pressure Trump placed on state officials during his address. Sherrill got the message loud and clear that the administration was not going to back down, and she decided the best course of action was to admit fault.

Of course, simply acknowledging one error isn’t nearly good enough. While Sherrill claims to care about election integrity, her government has rejected requests from the Department of Justice to review voter records – including driver’s license data – to address exactly these sorts of errors.

As I wrote for AMAC Newsline at the time, it is entirely possible that this disclosure is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what’s actually going on in New Jersey’s election system. This one admission could be a desperate attempt to distract from a much larger scandal hiding just beneath the surface. Voters in New Jersey and throughout the entire country deserve to know.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration remains hard at work to keep the pressure on states to remove ineligible voters. The Department of Justice has sued at least 29 states to compel them to provide access to their voter roll data. In July, the DOJ assistant attorney general for civil rights also wrote to election officials in all 50 states warning that they faced criminal penalties for knowingly allowing noncitizens to remain on voter rolls.

Additionally, the administration has aggressively prosecuted election fraud, racking up dozens of victories. In January 2025, 19 foreign individuals were indicted for illegally voting in the 2016 election. This past January, two men from New Jersey were charged with illegally voting in a federal election. A few weeks later, three illegal aliens were convicted of voting in a federal election in Florida. In March, ICE arrested an illegal alien who had voted in seven federal elections since 2008.

Passing the SAVE America Act remains absolutely critical, and conservatives should not relent in telling their members of Congress to get it across the finish line. But in the interim, President Trump is making real progress toward securing America’s elections. Those victories shouldn’t be ignored, because they provide the blueprint for how to get things done in the absence of legislative action.