The Trump administration is building a national citizenship data system

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/29/nx-s1-5409608/citizenship-trump-privacy-
voting-database

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.

For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national 
citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship 
for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth 
certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — 
or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security is offering another way.

DHS, in partnership with the White House's Department of Governmental 
Efficiency (DOGE) team, has recently rolled out a series of upgrades to a 
network of federal databases to allow state and county election officials 
to quickly check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists — both 
U.S.-born and naturalized citizens — using data from the Social Security 
Administration as well as immigration databases.

Such integration has never existed before, and experts call it a sea 
change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens — 
something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database 
of Americans' personal information has long been considered a third rail — 
especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who 
have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal 
government.

Legal experts told NPR they were alarmed that a development of this 
magnitude was already underway without a transparent and public process.

"That is a debate that needs to play out in a public setting," said John 
Davisson, the director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy 
Information Center. "It's one that deserves public scrutiny and sunlight, 
that deserves the participation of elected representatives, that deserves 
opportunities for the public to weigh in through public comment and 
testimony."

When federal agencies plan to collect or use Americans' personal data in 
new ways, there are procedures they are required to follow beforehand, 
including giving public notice.

Another privacy expert, University of Virginia School of Law professor 
Danielle Citron, called this data aggregation effort a "hair on fire" 
development. She told NPR she has questions if the project itself is 
lawful.

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.

Trump and his allies have continued to emphasize the issue. The Justice 
Department has prioritized its prosecution and Republican lawmakers are 
pushing new legislation at both the national and state level to require 
people show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

If this new tool is successful, it could provide local and state 
governments a powerful method to check the citizenship of almost all 
Americans without additional documentation requirements.

"Taking that burden of proof, if you will, off the voter … is a good 
thing," said Wyman, who also worked for the Department of Homeland 
Security on election security issues in the Biden administration.

But she noted that a national citizenship list and anything resembling a 
national voter registration list have been controversial ideas for a long 
time, so the Trump administration is wading into uncharted waters.

"All of us that live in this free country and this free society want to 
believe that there are some privacy rights that are still being upheld in 
our lives," Wyman said. "The attention to detail matters here in many, 
many big ways."

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which is under the 
Department of Homeland Security, is managing the tool. The agency did not 
provide more information about how it will work when contacted by NPR. In 
a statement, spokesman Matthew Tragesser called the development a "game 
changer" and said the agency looks forward to "implementing more updates."

"USCIS is moving quickly to eliminate benefit and voter fraud among the 
alien population," Tragesser said.

What SAVE did and what it does now
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.

For roughly the past decade, some voting officials have also used SAVE to 
check the citizenship of voters on their rolls, usually in instances where 
department of motor vehicle records indicated a voter is a noncitizen, 
since those records often aren't updated when a person naturalizes. 
Election officials could use SAVE to get a more recent immigration 
snapshot, which would either verify that a person had become a citizen and 
was indeed eligible to vote, or if no naturalization record was found, 
indicate to the official that they should reach out to the voter about 
whether they are a citizen.

But using SAVE for this sort of verification was unwieldy.

Election officials across the political spectrum complained they did not 
have the specific immigration identification numbers needed to query the 
system, and in cases where they did, it was expensive and labor intensive 
to submit one query at a time. Ahead of the 2024 election, some 
Republican-led states ramped up their complaints about the inadequacies of 
the tool. Just weeks before the election, Texas, Florida and Ohio sued 
DHS, arguing the Biden administration was failing to help states verify 
their voters' citizenship.

USCIS began planning upgrades to the system at the end of the Biden 
administration, according to a person who attended a briefing where it was 
discussed but was not authorized to speak to the media. After Trump took 
office, DHS began a series of regular calls with some state election 
staffers to talk through potential updates.

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. On April 22, the agency revealed SAVE was now free 
for non-federal agencies, and could handle mass checks. Then, a May 22 
news release announced SAVE had integrated data from the Social Security 
Administration so election officials could query it with a nine-digit 
Social Security number.

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. In a version that was last updated in June, the 
fact sheet now says that looking up U.S.-born citizens is possible with a 
Social Security number. "SAVE is able in many cases to verify U.S.-born 
U.S. citizens for voter verification purposes, through information 
accessed through the SSA," it reads. NPR has not yet spoken to a state 
voting official who has looked up a U.S.-born citizen on the new SAVE 
platform.

Social Security Administration data systems can show whether an applicant 
was a citizen or a noncitizen at the time they received their number, said 
Kathleen Romig, a former SSA official who works at the liberal-leaning 
policy nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Department of Homeland Security has combined that point-in-time 
citizenship information with SAVE's ability to more thoroughly tell 
whether a person has naturalized to create a system that voting officials 
can use to theoretically nail down citizenship status for voters they have 
Social Security numbers for.

Upon hearing the details, numerous voting data experts told NPR it sounded 
like a system that could work. The question, they say, is whether quality 
control systems are in place to catch the inevitable mistakes that will 
come from comparing hundreds of millions of records, especially when the 
stakes are as high as questioning someone's citizenship.

There are some known data challenges with SAVE. For instance, there can be 
a lag time between when a person naturalizes and when that information is 
entered into the system, which can lead to the initial appearance that a 
person is a noncitizen on the voter rolls if they registered to vote 
immediately after naturalizing. SAVE materials also make clear there are 
some foreign-born citizens who cannot be verified by the system.

USCIS acknowledges these shortfalls and tells users that if the system 
returns an answer other than confirming citizenship, then it must also be 
manually reviewed by USCIS staff, and the elections office must contact 
the voter to give them a chance to provide proof of citizenship.

It's also unclear how reliable or complete the data coming from the Social 
Security Administration is, because as MIT election expert Charles Stewart 
notes, that data as well as the data within SAVE and on the voter rolls 
was collected independently and without this sort of integration in mind. 
A report from the Institute for Responsive Government noted recently that 
the SSA only began adding citizenship tags to records roughly 40 years 
ago, so the agency's data on natural-born citizens may be incomplete.

"The concern with any of these data-based matching procedures is that 
people who don't know much about voter registration datasets just assume 
that the data are clean on [all] sides," said Stewart.

The most notable election data matching success story, a program called 
the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), took multiple years 
to develop and roll out. The system allows its more than two dozen member 
states to share government data across state lines, to eliminate dead 
voters from the rolls, find the few people in every federal election who 
illegally vote twice, and also register eligible voters when they move to 
a new place.

Nine Republican-led states have since pulled out of the organization due 
to viral falsehoods that spread on the far-right and general uneasiness 
about having a third party combing through state voter rolls. At least two 
of those states, Louisiana and Texas, are early piloters of this new data 
tool run by the federal government. The states have not disclosed many 
details and declined NPR's interview requests.

DHS says so far it has run more than 9 million voter records through the 
upgraded SAVE system, according to a person who attended a briefing about 
the new capabilities who was not authorized to speak to the media, and 
that early analysis found those records to contain 99.99% U.S. citizens. 
That analysis has not been independently verified, and it's not clear if 
any of the few noncitizens they did find ever actually voted.

"If this rolls out and it turns out that our voter rolls are pretty darn 
accurate … and it is shouted from the mountaintops and people believe it, 
then that would be big," said Tammy Patrick, an election expert at the 
nonprofit Election Center and former Arizona voting official. She noted 
however that there are large financial incentives, both for candidates and 
for grassroots election denial groups and influencers, to keep pushing 
misleading claims about noncitizen voting.

"My concern is that I'm not so sure that there will be those who will 
believe it, that there will be those who will stop raising donations and 
campaign funds on the narrative of fear-mongering and the illegitimacy of 
our systems," Patrick said.

Most states can't use the new SAVE capabilities yet because they don't 
collect full Social Security numbers as part of the voter registration 
process.

But the next SAVE upgrade will allow election officials to query with just 
the last four digits of a Social Security number, in addition to a full 
name and birthdate, according to two people who were on calls where such 
plans were discussed but asked not to be named because they were not 
authorized to speak publicly about the plan. Such an expansion will make 
the citizenship searches available for all voting officials, although 
there is a wide range across the country when it comes to how much of a 
state's voter records have even partial Social Security numbers associated 
with them.

Future plans also include integrating state DMV data, according to the 
same sources, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is expected to 
reach out to every state's chief election official soon encouraging them 
to run their rolls through the system.

Some Republican election officials have been happy that DHS is taking 
their concerns about SAVE seriously. Idaho's Republican Secretary of State 
Phil McGrane used SAVE extensively ahead of the 2024 election, but found 
it difficult to use.

"This wasn't what the database was meant for and we were asking something 
of it that it really wasn't designed for," McGrane told NPR in early June. 
"Now there is attention being put to it to make it work that way."

However when NPR reached out more recently to ask about SAVE's new broader 
citizenship check capabilities, a spokesperson for McGrane's office, 
Chelsea Carattini, said the secretary had not been briefed or made aware 
of those changes by the federal government.

Who gets to know what's being built
While USCIS denied NPR's interview request about the changes and has 
sporadically shared updates with some state voting officials, a DHS 
staffer gave a full briefing about the tool to an influential group known 
for pushing false and misleading election fraud narratives.

On June 12, the Election Integrity Network, a grassroots group led by 
conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell, who worked with Trump to try to 
overturn the 2020 election, hosted a virtual event with David Jennings, 
who oversees the SAVE system. Democracy Docket first reported the 
briefing.

NPR also acquired audio of Mitchell seemingly speaking about Jennings at 
an earlier Election Integrity Network event in May. The nonprofit 
investigative group Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism 
project, provided a recording to NPR.

"He is in charge of the SAVE database that has the citizenship data for, 
you know, everybody," Mitchell said at the May event. "And he is in the 
process of reconfiguring the entire [thing] so that we can actually 
determine who on the voter rolls is and is not a citizen."

Voting experts NPR spoke with expressed concern that the agency overseeing 
the creation of the voter data tool was sharing details with a group 
involved with denying the 2020 election results, but not the American 
public.

"Before the federal government just up and creates a massive data system 
that purports to be a record on all of us — that's a public conversation 
that we're owed," said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and 
former Biden White House adviser on voting rights. "And not just as a 
public policy matter, as a moral matter, as a legal matter."

Under the Privacy Act of 1974, there is a formal process known as a system 
of records notice, for federal agencies to give public notice about new 
ways they intend to collect or use Americans' personal information. No 
such notice appears to have been published for the upgrade to SAVE that 
integrates Social Security data, and neither USCIS or SSA responded to an 
NPR inquiry asking if a new one had been issued.

Data unknowns
The SAVE upgrade is part of a larger trend, led by DOGE, of the Trump 
administration taking unprecedented steps to amass and connect data across 
the federal government. The effort has sparked over a dozen lawsuits and 
cybersecurity concerns.

The public officials condemning the data consolidation have mostly been 
Democrats, however, which is a departure from past privacy debates in 
American history.

"One thing that's rather striking about these moves around data in the 
present is that there has been so little outcry actually on the right, who 
have been sort of the standard bearers of worry about big government and 
data merging and data collection to begin with," said Sarah Igo, a history 
professor at Vanderbilt University.

One conservative voice who is expressing such concerns is Catherine 
Engelbrecht, the founder of the nonprofit True the Vote, which has pushed 
numerous election conspiracy theories over the past decade.

Engelbrecht praised the SAVE effort in a recent newsletter, but expressed 
discomfort about the administration's efforts to centralize various 
federal databases and give access to the contractor Palantir.

"Such centralization of data poses a threat to individual freedoms and 
privacy," she wrote. "Surrendering our data to unchecked power isn't just 
a technical risk — it's a moral failure."

One of the biggest questions about the new SAVE is what happens to the 
voter data that states and counties upload to the system, particularly 
since it is now designed to verify entire state voter rolls.

USCIS specifies that it retains records of SAVE queries for 10 years. The 
agency did not respond to NPR's questions about whether it will keep 
copies of state voter rolls uploaded to SAVE, or whether it will use 
information states provide through the system as a basis for criminal or 
immigration investigations.

A state election official who was not authorized to speak publicly about 
the development told NPR they were specifically worried about how the 
administration would use information provided by states in immigration 
crackdown efforts. For that reason, the official, who has worked in both 
Republican and Democratic administrations, said they expected there to be 
a clear partisan division in which states use it, even if all election 
officials have the same goal of accurate voter rolls.

"If I believed this database was accurate, and that I was going to get 
good usable information from it, you're damn right I would use it," the 
official said. "The question is, is the data usable? And [usable] in a way 
that I'm not going to jeopardize people who live in my jurisdiction?"


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama 
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.