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The information landscape in the United States is busted. Billionaires are using the powerful social media platforms and media outlets they control to curry favor with Trump.
Google paid Trump $25 million to settle a bogus lawsuit.
Jeff Bezos purged Trump critics from the Washington Post opinion page.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg canceled fact-checking on Facebook.
A pro-Trump billionaire bought CBS News — and is now buying CNN.
The only way to fight back is to build up independent media that is free from the influence of billionaires and corporate America.
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President Trump and the election conspiracy theorists he surrounds himself with are determined to exclude people from voting in the 2026 election based on one database: the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE).
Why?
SAVE is an incomplete and flawed database that has been shown to produce a massive number of false positives, incorrectly identifying American citizens as aliens. Thus, using SAVE to exclude voters buttresses the lie that a significant number of undocumented immigrants vote in elections.
Trump’s latest effort came last week when he signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use SAVE and other databases, to create, for each state, “a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” Trump’s executive order then directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute “individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots” to anyone not on the list.
It is an effort to coerce states to use the SAVE database to purge voters or risk criminal charges.
But SAVE, as its full name suggests, was designed to determine eligibility for government benefits — not citizenship. And, crucially, “[n]ot all of the data is necessarily up to date.”
Shortly after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search SAVE for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.
Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.
In Missouri, for example, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. In St. Louis County, Missouri, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as non-citizens. But the county immediately determined that 35% of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133 — meaning at least 81% of the original data was incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and 90 days to appeal.
Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be U.S. citizens — our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”
Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, Texas, SAVE identified 84 non-citizens who were registered to vote. Twelve of those responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest of the group did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, but county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.
“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”
Trump’s executive order also attempts to weaponize the United States Postal Service (USPS), prohibiting it from mailing ballots to anyone who does not appear on the new federal list of voters.
Trump’s executive order, which would inject chaos into the voting process months before the election, is already being challenged in multiple court cases. These challenges have a good chance of success because the Constitution is very clear that states, not the federal government, have the primary authority to administer elections. Congress can pass laws that impact election administration, but Trump is attempting to invalidate state laws and procedures by executive fiat.
Trump’s efforts to enlist the USPS are also legally dubious, because it is an independent agency legally obligated to deliver mail throughout the country in a neutral manner. Trump’s order would transform the USPS into an arbiter of voter eligibility.
But even if this executive order is blocked by the courts, the push to purge voters from the rolls before November — or challenge ballots after the votes are in — remains a threat.
The other paths to a voter purge
Trump’s executive order is trying to force states to cross-reference their voting list with the SAVE database. But even before the executive order was issued, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced in November 2025 that 26 states