Require grantee states to share DMV and voter registration databases

Research notes

Instrument sought: a DHS grant condition requiring state or local applicants to give federal law enforcement access to motor-vehicle and voter-registration databases.

Searched, in the federal records we keep (fetched 2026-08-28): presidential documents, final rules, proposed rules and notices in the Federal Register, filtered to DHS and its components; bills in Congress and public laws, from congress.gov; White House presidential actions; and federal court dockets (CourtListener), including the bulk snapshot of 1.2 million dockets. Nothing conditioning DHS grants on database access was found.

• Confirmed on the documents, 2026-09-03, rather than inferred. Our first note said “total access to state DMV and voter files is a further step that no allowlisted document read for this pass takes”, which was true but rested on not having read the two documents that would carry the step. Both open — the DHS Standard Terms and Conditions and its PDFs, and the FY2025 Homeland Security Grant Program funding notice — and were read in full. The negative reaches DHS’s published department-wide grant terms and the FY2025 HSGP NOFO; it does not reach award-specific conditions attached to an individual grant, which are not published.

• One adjacent requirement in the NOFO, recorded so it is not mistaken for this ask: jurisdictions taking election-security money must “[p]rioritize compliance with the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) 2.0”, test through an accredited Voting System Test Laboratory, and use USCIS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system to verify that anyone working at a polling place is a U.S. citizen, with 3 percent of the award withheld from drawdown until compliance is confirmed. That is SAVE run against poll workers by the state, not federal access to the state’s voter file.

• Adjacent but not this ask: EO 14399, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections (signed 2026-03-31), runs the other way — it directs USCIS to compile and send to states a list of confirmed citizens, and its enforcement section contemplates withholding federal funds from non-compliant states, not conditioning DHS grants on states surrendering DMV and voter files.

• Unified Agenda, 2026-09-01. DHS’s full Unified Agenda (the 2026 agenda, 59 RINs) was read at reginfo.gov rather than the abbreviated Federal Register version. No DHS RIN mentions voter registration, and the one reference to motor-vehicle offices is TSA’s REAL ID remote-issuance rule (1652-AA78), which is about how States issue licenses, not about DHS reading their files. The only entry reaching DHS grant conditions is RIN 1601-AB23, Revisions to Subtitle B of Title 2 on Federal Financial Assistance, DHS/OS, Proposed Rule Stage, whose NPRM has already published as part of the government-wide Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance of 2026-05-29 (2026-10817); it conditions nothing on database access. Subject area, not this ask’s object, so the Status is unchanged. https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=1601-AB23

• The FY2027 NDAA’s Division E, the SAVE America Act (reviewed 2026-09-24, read 2026-09-23). H.R. 8800 passed the House on 2026-07-22 and the Senate received it 2026-09-14; the engrossed text is at govinfo.gov. Division E (secs. 4801 ff.) requires documentary proof of citizenship to register, including through the motor-voter application, and requires that “Each State shall submit the complete, official list of individuals registered as eligible voters for Federal office in the State to the Department of Homeland Security for comparison through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (‘SAVE’) system”, drawing also on state driver’s-license agencies that confirm citizenship. That would put every state’s voter file in DHS’s hands, which is the voter-registration half of this Quote’s database limb, but as a statutory duty on every State and not as a condition of DHS grants, which is this item’s object. Progress is measured on the ask’s own object, so this is a note, not an attempted event. It is the closest any instrument has come to this item. If Division E is enacted, the database access the Quote wants would exist without the grant lever, and the item would be worth re-reading against that.