This 12 months, when states started utilizing an expanded Division of Homeland Safety system to test their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was imagined to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness information from throughout federal businesses to show illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement.
DHS had lately integrated confidential information from the Social Safety Administration on lots of of thousands and thousands of further individuals into the software, referred to as 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, nevertheless, didn’t precisely again up President Donald Trump’s rivalry 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 charge of about 0.014%.
As a substitute, consultants say, the sweeping data-sharing settlement authorizing DHS to merge Social Safety information into SAVE may threaten People’ privateness and result in errors that disenfranchise respectable voters.
The main points of the settlement, which haven’t beforehand been reported, present it comprises alarmingly few guardrails to make sure accuracy and scant specifics on how the information shall be stored safe, election and privateness attorneys who’ve reviewed it say. Additional, it explicitly doesn’t bar DHS from deploying the SSA information 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 types of historically tightly managed federal data, even tax information.
Till this 12 months, SAVE contained data solely on immigrants who’d had contact with DHS, corresponding to these with everlasting resident standing, and had been assigned immigrant identification numbers. State and native officers usually used the system to confirm immigrants’ standing after they utilized for advantages corresponding to SNAP or to test, one after the other, whether or not people who had been registering to vote had been residents.
Below the Might 15 data-sharing settlement, which was posted lately on the Social Safety Administration’s web site, the system added data, together with full Social Safety numbers, on thousands and thousands of People not in DHS databases. The mixed dataset joins collectively this data with addresses, beginning dates and legal data, together with immigration histories.
The settlement permits the SSA’s information for use for searches to test voters’ citizenship, together with “different approved inquiries from Federal, State, territorial, tribal and native authorities businesses in search of to confirm or verify the citizenship or immigration standing of people inside their jurisdiction.”
In doing these searches, SAVE shops not solely the voter information that election officers add but additionally the result of their queries, based on 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 information to SAVE may 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 commonly outdated or incomplete, particularly for individuals who grew to become naturalized residents. With the 2026 midterms a few 12 months away, Caren Brief, director of authorized and analysis for the League of Ladies Voters of the USA, mentioned 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 information,” Brief mentioned.
A number of privateness attorneys mentioned they consider it’s unlawful for DHS to develop the usage of SAVE with out taking steps required in federal legislation, corresponding to issuing a system of data discover to tell the general public how the extra information shall be collected, saved and used. Final month, advocacy teams sued the federal authorities, alleging that its growth of SAVE and different information consolidation efforts violate the Privateness Act, a federal legislation 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 mentioned that one other statute, the Unlawful Immigration Reform and Immigrant Duty 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 giant 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 information and information from a number of techniques.
“They’re in all probability going to make some huge errors,” he mentioned.
This summer season, 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 towards numerous states which have refused to conform.
Among the states which have refused to supply voters’ personal data on to the Justice Division have entered into agreements with DHS beneath which they add that very same data into the SAVE system.
In accordance with a doc obtained by the ACLU, which sued the administration for SAVE-related data, 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 exhibits.
As counsel for Shield Democracy, a nonprofit voting rights group, Naomi Gilens makes a speciality of points associated to privateness and know-how. Gilens mentioned it’s necessary for People to think about 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 mentioned.
As of final month, Homeland Safety officers had run greater than 33 million voters via SAVE, USCIS instructed NPR. To this point, 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.
In accordance with 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 apart 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 Price range and Coverage Priorities, fear even these steps received’t be sufficient to stop mismatches from taking place.
Individuals’s names might be misspelled or listed in a different way within the varied datasets. Many states gather 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 mentioned.
“If there’s Jane Smith that may be a citizen, and a Jane Smith that isn’t, you don’t wish to disenfranchise the citizen Jane Smith accidentally,” Romig mentioned.
Federal officers aren’t completed including information to SAVE. Subsequent up, based on a current 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.)
