This yr, when states started utilizing an expanded Division of Homeland Safety system to verify their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was presupposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness knowledge from throughout federal businesses to show illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement.
DHS had just lately integrated confidential knowledge from the Social Safety Administration on a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of further individuals into the device, often called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. The added data allowed the system to carry out bulk searches utilizing Social Safety numbers for the primary time.
The preliminary outcomes, nonetheless, didn’t precisely again up President Donald Trump’s competition that noncitizen voting is widespread. Texas recognized 2,724 “potential noncitizens” on its rolls, about 0.015% of the state’s 18 million registered voters. Louisiana discovered 390 amongst 2.8 million registered voters, a price of about 0.014%.
As an alternative, specialists say, the sweeping data-sharing settlement authorizing DHS to merge Social Safety knowledge into SAVE might threaten People’ privateness and result in errors that disenfranchise legit voters.
The small print of the settlement, which haven’t beforehand been reported, present it accommodates alarmingly few guardrails to make sure accuracy and scant specifics on how the info shall be saved safe, election and privateness attorneys who’ve reviewed it say. Additional, it explicitly doesn’t bar DHS from deploying the SSA knowledge for different functions, together with immigration enforcement.
Specialists have raised comparable issues about different elements of the Trump administration’s data-pooling drive, which has sought to faucet all kinds of historically tightly managed federal data, even tax knowledge.
Till this yr, SAVE contained data solely on immigrants who’d had contact with DHS, reminiscent of these with everlasting resident standing, and had been assigned immigrant identification numbers. State and native officers sometimes used the system to confirm immigrants’ standing after they utilized for advantages reminiscent of SNAP or to verify, one after the other, whether or not people who had been registering to vote had been residents.
Beneath the Might 15 data-sharing settlement, which was posted just lately on the Social Safety Administration’s web site, the system added data, together with full Social Safety numbers, on hundreds of thousands of People not in DHS databases. The mixed dataset joins collectively this data with addresses, beginning dates and prison information, together with immigration histories.
The settlement permits the SSA’s knowledge for use for searches to verify voters’ citizenship, together with “different approved inquiries from Federal, State, territorial, tribal and native authorities businesses searching for to confirm or verify the citizenship or immigration standing of people inside their jurisdiction.”
In doing these searches, SAVE shops not solely the voter knowledge that election officers add but in addition the result of their queries, in keeping with the data-sharing settlement and different paperwork from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Companies, the department of DHS that oversees SAVE. The paperwork don’t clarify who can entry this data or how it may be used.
Specialists say including Social Safety knowledge to SAVE might assist election officers confirm, en masse, if voters are U.S. residents, however it shouldn’t be used to make last determinations that individuals aren’t residents.
That’s as a result of a number of audits and analyses have proven that SSA’s citizenship data is usually outdated or incomplete, particularly for individuals who turned naturalized residents. With the 2026 midterms a couple of yr away, Caren Brief, director of authorized and analysis for the League of Ladies Voters of america, stated she fears the expanded use of SAVE will result in errors.
“The Trump administration is looking individuals to attempt to purge individuals from the rolls who’re lawfully registered, and they’re doing it by unreliable, outdated knowledge,” Brief stated.
A number of privateness attorneys stated they consider it’s unlawful for DHS to broaden the usage of SAVE with out taking steps required in federal regulation, reminiscent of issuing a system of information discover to tell the general public how the extra knowledge shall be collected, saved and used. Final month, advocacy teams sued the federal authorities, alleging that its growth of SAVE and different knowledge consolidation efforts violate the Privateness Act, a federal regulation that prohibits public businesses from misusing personal data.
Officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Companies declined to reply questions from ProPublica.
In a submitting responding to the advocacy teams’ lawsuit, federal officers stated that one other statute, the Unlawful Immigration Reform and Immigrant Accountability Act of 1996, explicitly permits data sharing to confirm citizenship standing and that businesses would train warning in figuring out whether or not voters are noncitizens.
“There’s zero foundation to imagine that State officers have any curiosity in haphazardly and unlawfully eradicating massive numbers of U.S. residents from their voter rolls, and no credible proof that any such factor has occurred or goes to occur any time quickly” the submitting says.
Nonetheless, Leland Dudek, performing SSA commissioner till early Might, instructed ProPublica he doesn’t belief that DHS will precisely flag noncitizens as officers attempt to cross-match knowledge and recordsdata from a number of techniques.
“They’re in all probability going to make some large errors,” he stated.
This summer time, the Justice Division began demanding entry to state voter registration lists, saying this was needed to make sure compliance with federal voter roll upkeep legal guidelines. The company has filed lawsuits in opposition to various states which have refused to conform.
A few of the states which have refused to supply voters’ personal data on to the Justice Division have entered into agreements with DHS underneath which they add that very same data into the SAVE system.
Based on a doc obtained by the ACLU, which sued the administration for SAVE-related information, a rising variety of states are signing agreements with DHS to make use of SAVE to vet voter rolls. Ten states had signed such agreements coming into 2025; as of July, one other 10 had signed on, the doc reveals.
As counsel for Defend Democracy, a nonprofit voting rights group, Naomi Gilens makes a speciality of points associated to privateness and know-how. Gilens stated it’s vital for People to contemplate if they need the federal government — together with future administrations, not simply this one — to have a lot consolidated data on them.
“That may be a very invasive image that begins to be painted, in a single place, for each particular person who lives right here’s personal lives,” she stated.
As of final month, Homeland Safety officers had run greater than 33 million voters by way of SAVE, USCIS instructed NPR. Up to now, the company has declined to say publicly what the result of those queries have been.
However the preliminary outcomes are tucked into one other doc obtained by the ACLU.
As of late August, about 96.3% of the voters checked within the SAVE system had been recognized by the system as U.S. residents. For an extra 3.1% of voters, the system both couldn’t discover them or wanted extra data to find out their citizenship standing. About 0.5% of voters checked had died, the system discovered. And 0.04% confirmed up as noncitizens.
Based on copies of 12 state agreements with DHS obtained by the ACLU and reviewed by ProPublica, election officers are required to take further steps to confirm SAVE outcomes for voters the system identifies as aside from U.S. Residents. Then, if SAVE nonetheless can’t confirm citizenship, the election officers “should contact the registrant or registered voter to acquire proof of citizenship.”
Dudek and Kathleen Romig, a former Social Safety official who now works on the Heart on Finances and Coverage Priorities, fear even these steps gained’t be sufficient to stop mismatches from occurring.
Folks’s names will be misspelled or listed in another way within the numerous datasets. Many states accumulate partial, not full, Social Safety numbers from voters and matches utilizing partial numbers shall be even much less correct, since many individuals share the identical names, Dudek and Romig stated.
“If there’s Jane Smith that could be a citizen, and a Jane Smith that isn’t, you don’t wish to disenfranchise the citizen Jane Smith by chance,” Romig stated.
Federal officers aren’t achieved including knowledge to SAVE. Subsequent up, in keeping with a latest USCIS presentation to election officers shared with ProPublica: passport data from the State Division. (The State Division referred ProPublica’s request for remark to DHS, which didn’t reply.)
