The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.
The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.
The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.
The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.
NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.
Many other questions about the new system remain, including which states plan to use it and how, what sort of data security measures are being taken and how trustworthy the data the tool provides will be. It’s also unknown what the federal government plans to do with the voter records after they’ve been run through the system.
The recent history of elections is littered with failed data matching efforts, often driven by false fraud narratives, which have entangled eligible voters. The first Trump administration attempted the beginnings of a similar data project, though the effort shuttered after most states balked at sharing their voter data.
The fact that the development and rollout follow President Trump’s falsehoods about widespread noncitizen voting makes election experts wary of how this new tool will work.
“We’ve never had a list of U.S. citizens to compare our voter registration lists to,” said Kim Wyman, the former Republican secretary of state of Washington who is now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It seems like it takes the federal government more than just [a few] months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that’s going to be accurate … That’s what my concern is, just first and foremost, that the list is accurate.”
Everyone registering to vote must swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are a U.S. citizen. The consequences for noncitizens who try to vote include fines, prison time and deportation. Officials say that deterrent is why cases of ineligible people casting ballots are incredibly rare — a fact that’s become increasingly apparent as more and more states devote resources to uncovering the few people that slip through the cracks every election. Research has also shown that when noncitizens do vote, it’s often not to commit fraud but rather because they misunderstood eligibility rules.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which is under the Department of Homeland Security, is managing the tool.
This new citizenship check capability comes from a massive expansion of a tool voting officials only used sparingly in the past.
The tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, is a system of DHS databases that state and federal agencies have queried since the 1980s to check the immigration status of noncitizens living in the U.S. legally. Agencies can then decide if the applicants are eligible for different government benefits.
A key turning point came in March, when Trump signed an executive order that made sweeping changes to voting and election protocols, including requiring DHS to allow states “access to appropriate systems” for verifying the citizenship of voters on their rolls without a cost, and instructing DOGE to assist the agency in combing voter rolls for noncitizens.
The order also instructed the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting noncitizens who register to vote, whether they actually voted or not, using “databases or information maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.”
Within weeks, USCIS began announcing rolling upgrades to SAVE, crediting DOGE with the changes.
Though the May news release didn’t mention it explicitly, the Social Security change meant for the first time SAVE could verify the citizenship of U.S.-born Americans with a valid Social Security number, which nearly every American citizen has.
That development is a major move that turned SAVE from a tool that only responded to queries about foreign-born citizens or noncitizens into something that could comb through entire voter lists. But numerous state voting officials NPR spoke with were not aware that capability was part of the updates.
As recently as late April, a USCIS fact sheet about using SAVE for voting records said the opposite. “SAVE does not verify U.S. born citizens under any circumstances. SAVE does not access databases that contain U.S.-born citizen information,” the web page read, according to a snapshot captured by the Internet Archive.
That has now been changed.
Add new comment