The mechanism is a conditional grant. To keep their share of the Homeland Security Grant Program - money for counterterrorism and disaster preparedness - states would have to verify voter citizenship through the federal SAVE database, switch to hand-marked paper ballots, run a 5 percent manual audit, and cooperate with federal immigration enforcement [2][3]. States that decline forfeit 20 percent of the grant, about $148 million across the plaintiffs [3].
On July 23, twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued FEMA and DHS in federal court in Rhode Island to stop it [2]. California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, who co-leads the suit, said Trump is trying 'to bully state and local governments into adopting his preferred policies in exchange for much-needed funding,' and predicted the effort would fail as similar ones have [2]. Rhode Island's Peter Neronha said federal emergency funding 'cannot and will not be held hostage from states' [3].
The justification for the conditions is a specific number. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the department 'identified more than 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote,' and Trump has cited 278,000 [1].
That figure does not survive the record. FactCheck.org reports the SAVE system flagged about 28,000 registrations out of 68 million - roughly 0.04 percent - and that election experts describe the larger numbers as false positives, produced by matching that lacked Social Security or driver's-license identifiers and swept in naturalized citizens [1]. The Heritage Foundation, no opponent of voter-fraud claims, keeps a database recording just under 100 noncitizens convicted of illegally registering or voting since 1982 - across 44 years [1].
The demand asks states to remake how they run elections, on pain of losing disaster money, to solve a problem the government's own flagged data and its allies' own records size at a fraction of a percent [1][3].
