DHS Takes Break From Ethnic Cleansing To Help States Do Voter Suppression
DHS: Hey, thanks for suing us, four red states!
In a move that’s likely to be seriously bad for democracy because it takes a couple of sentences to explain, the Department of Homeland Security is retooling a federal immigration database in ways that states can use to strike people from voter rolls by claiming they’re not eligible to vote. The weaponization of the data system results from settling a lawsuit by Florida and three other red states (Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa) that claimed they really needed to use the database to check whether everyone on their voter rolls is a citizen or not.
Just one problem: the database, a decades-old system called (optimistically) the “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements” (SAVE), was designed only to check whether applicants are eligible for federal benefits like Medicaid or SNAP at the time they apply for benefits, not as a permanent record of citizenship status or eligibility for voting.
Up until now, SAVE was at best a tool that could flag people who might not be eligible to vote, information that would need to be investigated further at the state/local level. It’s still only good for that, but DHS and red state officials are pretending that now it’s a system for identifying ineligible voters. SAVE is notoriously prone to erroneously flagging US citizens as potential noncitizens, and there’s no indication that the “upgrade” will fix such problems. Using it to determine eligibility for voting is damn near guaranteed to mean eligible voters will be purged from voting rolls in the name of protecting the “integrity” of the vote. The changes DHS is making will make it easy for states to purge large numbers of voters based on dubious data, potentially giving Republicans an extra little edge in the 2026 congressional midterms, as well as in state and local elections.
As Democracy Docket notes, the changes mean that “States could run entire voter lists through a system that has repeatedly been shown to misidentify naturalized citizens, married voters who changed their names and anyone whose records contain minor inconsistencies.”
An October court filing in a separate case noted that as many as 25 percent of the “non-citizen matches” flagged by SAVE in Travis County, Texas, were actually naturalized citizens. But if that means a quarter of people with Latino names get disqualified, that might be perfectly fine with the Trump administration. (Though if it pulls in a lot of tradwives who recently changed their names, EEK!)
Worse, the settlement specifies that the unreliable database will be available to any state for the next 20 years, just to ensure the fuckery outlives the Trump administration. It’s all part of the larger GOP strategy to remain in power even when the Trump Party is bleeding support among voters.
In reality, voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, as proven even in investigations by red states, as well as in lawsuits over proposed voting purges. But Republicans rely on the myth of widespread voting by noncitizens as an excuse for voter purges. And since mere facts seldom get in the way of a good right-wing myth, Republicans get away with voter suppression schemes over and over again, all in the name of “protecting” the vote from imaginary threats.
And of course Republican officials love the publicity they get whenever they breathlessly announce they’ve found “thousands” or even “tens of thousands!!!!” of illegal noncitizen voters using driver’s license records. Such stories ALWAYS fall apart on closer examination, because, as in Texas in 2019, the scary “potential illegal voters” list was based on old information: almost without exception, those on the list got their driver’s license when they had a green card, then later were naturalized and exercised their right to vote.
Unsurprisingly, rightwingers always remember the breathless announcements, not the later debunkings and the investigations that find a handful, not thousands, of people who voted or registered when they shouldn’t have. (They do sometimes seize on the few rare cases of illegal voting, though, to cry, “Looks like that thing libs say never happened is happening AGAIN,” and then they win all arguments forever.)
But back to the current fuckery: one of the plaintiffs, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, joined the lawsuit after claiming just before last year’s election that he’d found more than 2,000!!!! potential noncitizen voters, although ultimately the probe he ordered county officials to carry out narrowed it down to “dozens” who might have illegally voted, over the course of several elections. Despite the lack of any widespread organized fraud, Pate insisted that being able to run thousands of voter names through SAVE would have rooted out fraud. Oh, and maybe hundreds of eligible voters, too, but that’s their problem, now isn’t it? Don’t be named Maria Rodriguez or James Smith and you should be fine. And if you change your name after getting married, make sure you carry both your birth certificate and marriage license with you when you go to vote.
Months before settling the lawsuit, Trump’s DHS was already growing SAVE,
vastly expanding who and what data can be entered and searched. It allows DHS to share the data with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), which under Trump has embarked on a sweeping effort to pressure states to tighten voting rules and remove voters from the rolls.
And for the first time, DHS explicitly adds natural-born U.S. citizens to the system’s scope, allowing verification through Social Security numbers, passports and, soon, driver’s licenses.
The update may or may not have been legal, since it appears to have sidestepped any number of federal privacy protections for people’s personal data.
The settlement requires DHS to expand SAVE to make it capable of searching up to 1,000 names on voter lists in bulk, instead of entering voter names one by one. It also permits DHS to “enhance” the system by allowing states to “obtain US citizenship or immigration-status information when providing only first name and last name and date of birth,” even though that too is bound to result in more false positives.
But silly little legal nitpicks about “privacy” and “voting rights” don’t matter, because there’s an ethnic cleansing and voter suppression agenda to carry out, the end.
[Democracy Docket / Brennan Center / Des Moines Register / Democracy Docket /
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wtaf is wrong with gop. they are never happy about anything. they control the government both federally and in 28 states but all they do is whine about how oppressed they are. it's exhausting.
And I could run my high school yearbook through a crime database and get dozens of hits.
This is just Miller flailing as it all slips through his cold bony fingers.