DHS Unveils Tool to Check Voters’ Citizenship—and It’s a Disaster
The Department of Homeland Security’s new tool to check voters’ citizenship is mistakenly identifying people as noncitizens, according to a report Friday from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
In the past year, President Donald Trump has ordered the expansion of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, pooling classified and sensitive information on voters from across the federal government into one database in order to better determine citizenship on voter rolls.
But rollout of the revamped SAVE database came much too quickly: not all of the new data had been added yet, resulting in persistent mistakes. Not only were numerous voters being falsely declared noncitizens, but they were then being referred to the DHS for possible criminal investigations.
In March, Trump demanded the Department of Homeland Security give states free access to SAVE, and partner with the Department of Government Efficiency to comb through voter rolls. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) got Americans’ social security numbers from DOGE—of which some employees were accused of misusing that information in an attempt to overturn election results.
The biggest addition to the federal SAVE database was troves of confidential information from the Social Security Administration. David Jennings, the associate chief of the USCIS, bragged on a call that it had only taken two weeks to get the tool up and running. “I think that’s remarkable. Kind of proud of it,” he said.
In Missouri, Brianna Lennon, an official responsible for running elections in Boone County, was shocked when the federal database for verifying citizenship told her that 74 people on the county’s voter rolls weren’t actually citizens. A closer look at the documentation for those 74 people revealed that the computer had made a mistake: more than half of those people were citizens.
Lennon was among dozens of county clerks who raised alarms about inaccurate data. “It really does not help my confidence,” she told ProPublica, “that the information we are trying to use to make really important decisions, like the determination of voter eligibility, is so inaccurate.”
Mistakes also quickly popped up in Texas, another red state that was eager to implement Trump’s crackdown on noncitizen voting. At least 87 voters across 29 counties were affected by these errors, ProPublica reported.
The issue of non-citizen voting remains small to nonexistent. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. One might notice that Trump’s complaints about noncitizen voting evaporated after his victory last November. However, Trump seems to have revived his obsession ahead of the midterm elections.
Thus far, SAVE’s findings—faulty though they may be—still have not supported the Trump administration’s outrageous claims about noncitizen voting. Of about 35 million registered voters across seven states, only about 4,200 people, or 0.01 percent of registered voters, have been identified as noncitizens.
So far, 27 states have agreed to use SAVE, but others have hesitated over concerns about inaccuracies as well as voter privacy, and the potential utilization by DHS for Trump’s sweeping deportation scheme.