Exclusive: The Trump Administration Is Building A National Citizenship Data System

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Deepa Shivaram.

I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

And I'm Jude Jaffe Block.

I'm on the power and influence team.

And today on the show, an NPR exclusive, the Trump administration has built the first searchable data system that can check whether a person is a U.S.

citizen.

It's being rolled out now to help help states ensure non-citizens don't vote in federal elections.

So, Miles, let's start with this.

How big of a problem is non-citizen voting in federal elections?

We've talked about this a lot over the last year or two, right?

It has never been found to be a widespread problem in American elections.

And I will say people, states, government entities are devoting more resources than ever to try to find, root out this quote-unquote problem.

And it has still just never been found to be anything but microscopic numbers.

But I will say that for the kind of small number of people who are on voter rolls, when election officials do have a question about their citizenship, that has been an issue.

Election officials find it pretty tough.

It's laborious work.

It has traditionally taken a number of different data sources to try to nail down people's citizenship in cases specifically where you can imagine somebody with a green card who registered to vote at a DMV.

The DMV record's outdated, so it might look like to the election official that you're a non-citizen, which leads us to the tool that we're talking about today, which is called SAVE.

It's an acronym for the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program at DHS, and it traditionally was used to look in a bunch of different immigration databases and allow officials across many local governments to be able to check the immigration status of people.

Now, we found that this tool at least for voting officials is being expanded far beyond that small universe of non-citizens to be able to check the citizenship status of almost every American.

Yeah, well, Jude, let me bring you in here because that's kind of what I'm curious about.

I feel like a lot of people might assume that the federal government already had a list like this or a system like this of tracking all citizens, but that's not the case.

This is new.

That's right.

You know, and a lot of countries do have those kinds of lists and they have national IDs and federally run elections, but it's a whole different system in our history.

There's been vocal opposition from both sides of the aisle, and I'll say especially from political conservatives about the idea of the government consolidating data on Americans.

And so we wound up with like a federal government with a lot of data silos by design.

So we spoke to John Davison about this.

He's the director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.

I mean, and he says, you know, to

have something this monumental of a change, you really need to have a public conversation about it.

There needs to be opportunity for the public to weigh in, to give comment, and

even for elected officials to weigh in as well.

Yeah, I feel like when the federal government is rolling out any kind of new policy or new rules, they have to go through this waiting period to collect public comment to go through this process that takes usually a lot longer.

So, Miles, who is pushing for this then?

Is this something that state election officials have been asking for?

So, election officials had been pushing for improvements to the old SAVE, the version that just searched within this kind of network of immigration databases.

But this massive expansion went way beyond what any of the voting officials I've spoken to were kind of dreaming of when they talked about improving this save system.

And then what's also interesting here is that our reporting found that the Department of Homeland Security, a staffer of the Department of Homeland Security, actually briefed a prominent election denial group on the updates to the system, while at the same time having not briefed many state election officials who told us they did not know this capability existed or was coming.

And so you've kind of got this clear message of priorities in terms of as this new tool is being developed, who is kind of the the first person to hear about it.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and more in a moment.

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And we're back.

So, Jude, I know that there have been a lot of efforts to use data to improve elections in the past, but they haven't always gone well.

So do you actually know anything about how well this new tool works?

We don't, and that's a big concern.

I mean, there's a lot of issues that go into data matching and voter data.

And, you know, experts say this can be a very messy process.

So that's one of the big questions here, whether U.S.

citizens who are eligible to vote could be ensnared into being labeled potentially as ineligible.

That's something that's been a big problem in the past.

And so we'll have to see how this tool is actually working to know whether this is going to have the same problem.

I do think that the quick development, I mean, this seems to have been developed in just the last couple of months, is something that a number of experts we talked to noted.

I mean, Kim Wyman, who's the former Republican Secretary of State of Washington, said this.

Up until this point, we've never had a list of U.S.

citizens to compare our voter registration list to.

And it seems like it takes the federal government more than just four months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that's going to be accurate.

Yeah, so there's definitely concerns here about accuracy and then also potential things that could very much go wrong.

Yeah, and I mean, data matching in elections sounds really easy, but it's actually very difficult, especially when you talk to people who focus on on this stuff.

People think that the data is just clean on all the different sides, when in reality, it's unclear whether the Social Security Administration data that this tool is relying on is clean.

It's unclear how that's going to integrate with the voter roll data that they're trying to kind of connect to it.

And then there's these separate immigration databases that they're also trying to ping.

So with states having this tool, I mean, is it possible for states to say, you know, we don't want this, we're opting out?

Oh, absolutely.

One thing I should also note is that we talked to multiple secretaries of state who didn't even know this existed.

And so it's a little unclear how the broader voting community is going to respond to this, but I think election officials are very risk-averse people.

And so a lot of these questions, I would assume, would need to be answered before many of them just kind of hand over all of their election data to the federal government.

I will also note in the first Trump administration, there was a kind of similar effort to try to get a lot of this voter data, and more than 40 states just said no, thank you.

And so it will be really interesting to see whether this becomes a real partisan divide on if Republican-controlled states are maybe more willing to give their election data over for this sort of analysis.

Yeah, I'm very curious to see how, you know, especially that partisan divide that you mentioned, how people will react, the federal government collecting all of this data.

I mean, it's just one aspect of how the Trump administration has been gathering information, gathering data about U.S.

citizens, because the thing I'm thinking of is Doge, right?

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing across the federal government this effort that's really kind of unprecedented to link data sets in ways that haven't been done before.

We're also seeing a new reach into states with the federal government trying to get access to personal information on Americans and American residents that have historically been held by states and that haven't gone to the federal government before.

So this is a big theme.

There's more than a dozen lawsuits that address this.

And so it's kind of an unsettled issue right now.

Okay, so some of these states and these secretaries of states are saying, you know, we don't really want this data, we don't want to use this tool, but they're still giving up, you know, the information about citizenship status to the federal government.

So is it possible that the federal government can use this data for things that have nothing to do with voter rolls?

Aaron Powell, I would say no, in the sense that federal law definitely dictates that the federal government is not supposed to use data in ways that are

outside of the bounds of what the government has permission to use that data for.

That said, we're kind of in uncharted territory because it doesn't seem necessarily like DHS has followed all of those relevant privacy laws with the creation of this tool.

And so I think that has a lot of voting officials spooked.

I talked to one voting official who said basically, if this thing actually worked the way they say it's going to work, I would be kind of interested in that because it could make some of my systems more efficient.

But I don't trust that it's not going to put people in my jurisdiction in danger.

Yeah, that's one of the big questions here.

What else can all of this voter data being uploaded into this system be used for in the future?

We know from Trump's executive order on voting that he has directed federal agencies to prioritize identifying and prosecuting non-citizens who are on voter rolls and who vote, but also those who are just registered to vote, regardless of whether they voted.

So that does seem to be a priority for this administration.

We've seen a few of those prosecutions so far already in this administration.

All right, we're going to leave it there for for today.

I'm Deepa Shivaram.

I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Jude Joppy Block.

I'm on the Power and Influence team.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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