Project 2025 Contributor Outlines How Trump Can Roll Back Voting Rights
President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January, and one of the biggest threats of his administration is how he’ll reform voting and election laws. Throughout his campaign, Trump spoke about election integrity and gave a chilling warning that, should he return to office, people “won’t have to vote again.”
How might Trump accomplish such radical election reforms? It’s a question explored at length in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s book-length manifesto for reshaping the federal government into an authoritarian regime. Specifically in a chapter on Federal Election Commission reforms written by Hans von Spakovsky, a right-wing lawyer and former FEC commissioner.
Now, in a recent op-ed for the conservative outlet The Daily Signal, von Spakovsky outlines in further detail what Trump should do to roll back voting rights — specifically he explains what steps several federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should take and how it could potentially disenfranchise millions of voters.
The first suggestion von Spakovsky details is removing the DHS’s roadblocks for states to access citizenship data to verify the eligibility of voters on their voter rolls. Von Spakovsky claims that DHS “has made it difficult, if not impossible” for state election officials to access DHS databases to confirm the citizenship of voters. Throughout his campaign, Trump repeatedly spread disinformation about noncitizens voting en masse in federal elections, even though it’s illegal and has been for quite some time. Instances of noncitizens voting in federal elections are extremely rare.
Nonetheless, GOP leaders falsely claimed election integrity was at risk because of noncitizen voters. These claims were at the center of three controversial lawsuits filed by Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Texas against President Joe Biden’s administration and DHS to obtain citizenship data to verify registered voters on their state voter rolls. States can use the federal Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to check an individual’s immigration status, but Republicans argued that this program isn’t a sufficient tool for states trying to verify a voter’s citizenship status.
“State election officials need access to these databases to verify the citizenship status of registered voters,” von Spakovsky writes. “Yet DHS has delayed, prevented, and hindered access.”
He goes on to suggest that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), Trump’s pick to lead DHS, should “stop that obfuscation immediately” and “drain the DHS swamp of every employee involved in violating federal law and refusing to verify citizenship for state election officials.”
Von Spakovsky suggests how the Trump administration can further crack down on noncitizen voters by requiring DHS to forward information on naturalization application forms to state election officials. He also details how the DOJ “should instruct U.S. attorneys across the nation—all of whom will be selected by the returning president and confirmed by the Senate—to take advantage of federal jury information.”
Voter purges could get a federal assist
In the months leading up to the 2024 election, voting rights advocates raised alarm about the GOP’s legal efforts and disinformation campaign about noncitizen voting, noting how it could intimidate voters, suppress eligible voters from voting and generally sow discord in the election process — and results.
Both Alabama and Virginia developed programs to purge alleged noncitizens from their voter rolls, which prompted swift litigation by the DOJ, alleging that these programs violate the federal National Voter Registration Act. But von Spakovsky writes that those lawsuits “should be immediately dismissed with prejudice” by the DOJ, which could be led by longtime conservative attorney Pam Bondi. More chillingly, von Spakovsky adds that the current DOJ is wrong about its NVRA violation claims about Alabama and Virginia’s voter purge programs, and that the department’s criminal division “should ask those states for the files on those aliens for investigation and possible prosecution.”
The all-out assault on voting rights in von Spakovsky’s manifesto doesn’t stop with a federal crackdown on investigating noncitizen voting. He also suggests the extreme measures that the DOJ should take to force states to purge voters from their rolls. “A new Justice Department needs to go after the worst states in the country, places such as California and Nevada, that have some of the most inaccurate, error-ridden voter registration lists,” he writes.
Beyond voter purges, von Spakovsky outlines how Trump’s administration could go after absentee ballot receipt deadlines, claiming that the U.S. Constitution “gives the federal government authority over states in federal elections” when it comes to setting dates for choosing presidential electors and congressional elections. This dangerous reading of the Constitution could be used to severely curtail absentee ballot receipt deadlines. He mentions the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent decision regarding Mississippi’s absentee ballot receipt deadline — which held that it violates federal law — as an example of how Trump’s DOJ should enforce election deadlines.
Perhaps one of the most significant voting rights actions of Biden’s administration was his executive order to expand voting access by permitting some federal agencies to promote voter registration. State GOP leaders in Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Texas sued to rescind the order, only for a federal judge to reject the lawsuit. Von Spakovsky urges Trump to “immediately rescind” the order, writing that “Biden had no constitutional or statutory authority to promulgate this attempt by the federal government to interfere in our elections, and Congress didn’t appropriate funds for that purpose.”