The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to withhold billions of dollars in preparedness grant funding from states that decline to adopt a set of new election-security requirements. The conditions, attached to more than $1 billion available through the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Homeland Security Grant Programme, would require measures such as voter citizenship verification, post-election audits and greater use of hand-marked paper ballots. The move matters because it uses federal funding as leverage over how individual states run their elections, an area traditionally controlled by the states, and it aligns with President Donald Trump's and many Republicans' push to audit voter rolls and challenge slow vote-counting in states such as California.

To qualify for the grants, states would have to submit plans to move away from "unsecure electronic voting systems" that use QR codes or barcodes rather than hand-marked paper ballots, on the grounds that paper provides a clearer audit trail. After each federal election, participating states would need to conduct a manual audit of at least 5% of ballots cast, reconcile the number of voters with the number of ballots, and within 120 days of any award use the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database to verify the citizenship of every registered voter. The requirements arrive alongside a wider political fight over the SAVE America Act, a Republican bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, which has struggled to reach the 60 votes needed in the Senate; some Democratic governors have also criticised the SAVE database as poorly maintained, a claim DHS denies.