For decades, a quiet period has protected American voters. The assumption was simple: any mass purges of voter rolls had to be completed at least 90 days before an election. That buffer gave eligible voters who were mistakenly removed enough time to get back on the rolls.
Now, Republicans and the Trump administration are testing whether that protection still matters.
President Donald Trump is pushing for more aggressive reviews of voter rolls to find non-citizens and other ineligible voters. The Justice Department has launched a sprawling effort to obtain nearly every state’s voter registration file and review it for suspected non-citizens. For its review, the DOJ is using a federal immigration database tool known as SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — which has a track record of producing false positives.
The question is no longer theoretical. Republicans want to purge voter rolls right up to Election Day. And the legal fight over whether that is allowed is already underway.
The Quiet Period Under Attack
The National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day “quiet period” was designed to prevent last-minute removals that could disenfranchise eligible voters. The logic is straightforward: if you remove someone from the rolls a week before an election, they may not have time to correct the error and vote.
Some state election officials have indicated they want the freedom to remove names in the months or weeks before an election. Other election officials — along with voter advocates — are concerned that eligible voters are at risk of being disenfranchised by the ramp-up in purge programs, especially as Trump tries to get more involved.
Trump and top officials in his administration have been relentless in their claims that a flood of foreigners on the voter rolls has polluted elections, even though studies have shown non-citizen voting to be very rare.
That the Trump administration is attempting to insert the federal government more directly into the voting process makes the Republicans’ legal arguments about the quiet period “more concerning,” said Brent Ferguson, the senior director of strategic litigation at the Campaign Legal Centre, which has successfully sued states for violating the NVRA’s 90-day quiet period.
“It sets up a situation where the federal government itself is the actor trying to purge voters from the rolls in the days before the election, which is clearly illegal,” Ferguson said.
The Legal Precedent
An appeals court ruled in 2014 that Florida could not use the SAVE data system to purge its rolls within 90 days of an election because of the quiet period provision in the NVRA.
The Trump administration and Republicans argue that the ban does not apply to purges aimed at non-citizens and other people who should never have been registered in the first place. Another appeals court rejected that argument when it was made by Republican state officials in Virginia.
But the Supreme Court in 2024 issued an emergency order in that case that let then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin restart a voter removal program just days before the election that used state records to identify alleged non-citizens. (Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger formally ended the program when she took office this year, and the lawsuit was settled.)
Now the Republican National Committee is asking the Supreme Court to take up the question on the merits in a case arising from Arizona. The Justice Department has claimed in the litigation over its demands for state registration files that the quiet period does not apply to the voter roll review it is undertaking. And in Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose is making similar arguments to defend his list maintenance programs that use SAVE and state DMV data.
The Arizona case asking the Supreme Court to resolve the scope of the NVRA’s quiet period is unlikely to be resolved before the midterm elections. But it is possible that emergency litigation could force courts to weigh in on any removal programs conducted weeks or days before November’s vote, as was the case with lawsuits challenging Virginia’s and Alabama’s efforts to remove voters just before the 2024 election.
The Problem with SAVE
Advocates for more aggressive list maintenance programs say that there are fail-safes in place to protect against disenfranchisement. “The argument that states — and especially election officials — shouldn’t do their jobs or maintain accurate voter rolls because of a technicality is absurd,” RNC spokesperson Zach Parkinson told CNN. Parkinson said he rejects the idea that “we can’t have election integrity because an imaginary person might be disenfranchised.”
But the data tells a different story. Republican election officials who have embraced more aggressive voter list maintenance programs have found that a significant number of the people that SAVE flags as likely non-citizens are, in fact, citizens.
For instance, an Idaho review of its voter rolls last year using the SAVE system initially found 760 potential non-citizens among its nearly 1.1 million registered voters. But after further investigation, only about three dozen were referred to law enforcement to be probed for non-citizen registration or voting activity, Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane told CNN. That means more than 700 citizens were initially flagged as potential non-citizens — a false positive rate of over 90 per cent.
In the meantime, local election clerks have complained that they have received little or no guidance from their state election chiefs, who have passed along lists of people SAVE has tagged as likely non-citizens. According to a lawsuit challenging Texas’s use of SAVE, what local officials do with those lists varies greatly county by county. Some counties do additional investigations into those matches — using state records that document citizenship — to narrow the pool of voters who are then notified they will have their registrations cancelled unless they show proof of citizenship. Other counties are sending notices to every voter identified by SAVE as a suspected non-citizen.
The Department of Homeland Security told CNN earlier last month that as part of its revamp of the SAVE program, it has tasked 150 employees to conduct “manual checks” of the matches produced by the program for “inconsistencies” before sending those results to the states. As of early April, DHS had identified 21,000 individuals as potential non-citizens on the voter rolls out of 60 million cases submitted — a rate of 0.035 per cent. However, a larger share — about 3 per cent of all comparisons — have come back as inconclusive, according to Wren Orey, the director of the Bipartisan Policy Centre’s Elections Project.
The Risk to Eligible Voters
Conservatives stress that there are backup options to protect eligible voters who miss the notice from their election officials that their registrations are being cancelled unless they provide proof of citizenship. In the Virginia case, for instance, the state argued that any citizen who was wrongly removed could re-register when they showed up at the polls under the state’s same-day registration laws. In states without same-day registration, such voters would have access to provisional voting, which allows voters to cast ballots that are set aside and only counted once eligibility issues are resolved.
But critics say those backups are not sufficient, especially when removals happen days before an election.
“When you’re doing that within that 90-day period, that risk is just higher that those voters won’t have adequate time or notice to be able to provide the documents that they’ll need ahead of the election,” Orey told CNN. “Maybe their birth certificate doesn’t meet the requirements. Maybe they don’t have one handy. Maybe they don’t have a passport. That could take months to get.”
In addition, ending the quiet period for those types of purges could “dump” more work on election officials who will have to investigate whether the data matches are accurate while they are in the final sprint to prepare for an election, said Charles Stewart, an MIT professor who studies election systems.
“There is a reason why you do these investigations away from the election,” Stewart said.
The Bottom Line
For decades, the 90-day “quiet period” before elections has protected voters from last-minute purges. Republicans and the Trump administration are now testing whether that protection applies to purges aimed at non-citizens. The Justice Department is using the SAVE database — which has a history of false positives — to review voter rolls across the country. Some state election officials want the freedom to remove names weeks or days before an election. Others warn that eligible voters are at risk of being disenfranchised.
An appeals court has rejected the argument that the quiet period does not apply to non-citizen purges. But the Supreme Court issued an emergency order in 2024 that allowed Virginia to restart a voter removal program just days before the election. The Republican National Committee is now asking the Supreme Court to settle the question in a case from Arizona.
As Trump’s national citizenship voter verification bill has floundered in Congress, states have passed laws requiring regular checks of voter rolls against SAVE. The issue is likely to be back on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket this fall.
The quiet period was designed to protect voters. Republicans say it protects nothing but bureaucratic inertia. The courts will decide. But with the midterm elections approaching, the question is no longer theoretical: can you purge voter rolls days before an election? And if you can, how many eligible voters will be caught in the net?
