Dead Registrants Still Haunt Voter Rolls in These Battleground States Days Ahead of Midterms
30th October 2026
A Department of Homeland Security memo from July noted more than 400,000 deceased individuals were on the voter rolls across 25 states that were using the SAVE system, a federal database short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. That total is out of about 68 million voter records reviewed.
Control of the U.S. Senate could hinge on several competitive contests in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kansas. The Homeland Security memo shows each of these states identified tens of thousands of deceased people on voter registration rolls, but officials from those states and data from the Public Interest Legal Foundation assert that improvements have been made.
Two federal laws—the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act—require states to update their voter registration rolls and clear ineligible registrants.
Maine, a state with one of the most closely watched Senate races in the nation, had 3,181 dead people on its voter rolls, according to a Help America Vote Act complaint filed Wednesday by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. That’s down from 18,000 after a July review, but still a significant tally. The election watchdog found 693 duplicate registrations in the state.