States Use Trump Administration Data System To Root Out Noncitizen Voters

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

And we also have NPR's Jude Jaffe Block here with us.

Hey, Jude.

Hey.

Today on the show, millions of voters have had their personal information put into a federal data system in search for non-citizen voters.

What did that search uncover?

Jude, let's first explain what this database is and how it works.

So it's actually a data system that's housed at the Department of Homeland Security.

And it's existed since the 1980s.

And what it does is it pings various data systems that are all linked together.

And it's called SAVE, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.

And state agencies, federal agencies have had access to SAVE so that they can check whether foreign-born individuals are eligible for certain benefits.

In the past, they would use somebody's name and alien identification number to sort of find out if somebody could get welfare or food stamps or other kinds of benefits.

Now, it's been totally revamped.

For a few years now, it's been used by a few states to check whether there's any non-citizens on their voter rolls.

But the Trump administration has made it a priority to overhaul SAVE and really turn it into a user-friendly tool for states.

They've linked it with Social Security Administration data so that now actually entire states' voter rolls could be run through save to find out if anyone is not a citizen.

And so for the first time, it can check really citizenship of everyone, not just foreign-born people.

I think when people hear about that the federal government is using this new data system to run voter rolls, it's for a purpose that I think people assume is already kind of happening, that the government is doing these sorts of checks.

And they are to some extent.

But I think what people need to realize is that electronic voter records are a fairly new thing in a post-2000 development.

And so states are still kind of trying to figure out how to get all the different data.

You know, there's some data at the Social Security Administration, there's some data at the DMV, there's some data with the Postal Service, and trying to figure out how they can use all these different data sources to kind of clean their voter rolls.

And so this development with SAVE is another kind of move towards being able to do that, both potentially help find non-citizens, but also to help find dead voters on the rolls because Social Security also keeps track of that data.

So is SAVE meant to be the answer to all these systems that don't necessarily talk to each other?

Or supposedly, I mean, that's what the Trump administration is saying, basically, that they have overhauled this system to be able to quickly be able to find non-citizens in a way that they haven't before.

But I will note that there are still a lot more questions than answers at this point.

We know that more than 33 million voters have been run through it so far, but the Department of Homeland Security and the immigration arm of that department have not made any data really public about what those checks have found,

with the testing that has been done on it, or notably, which we can get into a little bit more, the security around this data.

Because to be able to run these checks, states have to provide at least the last four digits of a voter's social security number, which traditionally has been kind of a red line for many states in terms of providing that data to outside sources.

Okay, so you said 33 million have been run through this already.

Which states are using this database and what have they found?

We know several Republican-controlled states are beginning to run large swaths of their voter rolls through it.

So we know Missouri, Ohio, Texas.

We also found out more information from Louisiana earlier this month.

They ran all close to 2.9 million voters through it,

almost all of their voters through it.

And they found really low numbers of non-citizens.

They found 79 people who they suspect to be non-citizens who voted in that state since the 1980s.

That's 0.003%

of their voter roll.

They found a slightly larger number of people who are registered, who they believe are non-citizens, who did not vote.

So Louisiana has given these voters a few weeks to respond to see if they can indeed prove that they are citizens.

If not, they'll be taken off the voter rolls.

And the Secretary of State there has said that they're going to be turning those names over to law enforcement for prosecution.

And that includes people who were registered to vote and did not vote, but who were not eligible to be registered.

That too is a crime.

And I think as Save Use gets expanded, we're going to see more prosecutions of foreign-born people who wound up on the voter rolls.

And what's interesting about that is

some people wind up on voter rolls by accident.

And so it'll be interesting to see how that plays out in the courts.

So I do want to note, as you said, these are largely Republican states.

In fact, all of the states you listed are red states.

So is this a partisan thing?

Is there a partisan split, Miles, in how this new old system is being used?

Aaron Powell, Definitely the states that have been most eager to jump in and pilot this new program have been the Republican-trolled states.

But I will also note we've heard a lot of hesitation from other Republican states as well.

You know, North Carolina was offered a soft launch of this new tool, and they politely declined and said that they're still kind of looking to a lot of the open questions.

And then I talked to Mississippi's Republican Secretary of State, Michael Watson, who said, A, he's not sure that state law would even allow him to run his voter roll through the save system.

But then, B, there's still just a lot of questions about the data security.

We just want to make sure where's that data going?

And at the end of the day, is it stored?

What are they going to do with it?

Who has access?

Is it shared?

Is it?

You name it.

One key detail here is that the Department of Homeland Security's retention policies mean any data that is run through this system stays with the federal government for 10 years.

And that is a really important thing when you talk to voting officials, because the United States has never had a national voter registration list.

But if DHS says they're going to hold on to this data for 10 years and all the states, hypothetically, are supposed to run their roles through it, that essentially would give the Department of Homeland Security a point-in-time snapshot, which gets really close to potentially a national voter registration list, which is something that Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows noted to me.

And a list like that, a giant data list like that, could put forward a lot of security risks.

Here's how she put it.

Because it's never a question of if a large database is going to be hacked, but when and to what consequence.

If Mayor Garland were asking for this or President Biden, I have to think that the red states would be calling for their heads.

And yet now they are,

at least some of them, happily putting a lot of information into this system.

Jude, also, the Justice Department recently asked states for all of their voter information.

Are these things we're talking about connected?

So that is such a good question.

And this is actually a question that several secretaries of states had when they were in conversation with DHS, with U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Service, which oversees this save data system.

When they were talking with them in meetings this summer, we heard that they were asking, you know, what does this have to do with DOJ asking for voter role information?

And how should we be thinking about that in terms of this data, the same data questions that we were just talking about?

You know, how long are you guys going to store this?

Are you going to keep this information?

And they were told that DOJ is a separate agency, that DHS isn't interested in their lists.

But it does seem like there is more of a connection.

Just in recent days, DHS confirmed to other media outlets that there is data sharing with DOJ going on, and DOJ confirmed to us that the voter roll data that they're getting, that they are screening it for ineligible voter entries.

And that appears to mean that they are likely running it through save.

So this does seem to be connected, that DOJ getting voter role information from states, if they do get voter data that has social security information in it, four digits of a social security number and a birthday and a name, they could run it through SAVE potentially.

And that's what seems to be going on.

And why is the Department of Justice doing this?

Are they looking for people to prosecute?

Yes.

President Trump has made it clear, basically since he was inaugurated, that one of his priorities was to root out non-citizen voting.

Now, again, just to zoom out, there is still no evidence that non-citizen voting happens at anything but a microscopic level.

And Louisiana, running their entire voter roll through SAVE, found 0.003%, which means more than 99.99% of the voter rolls were citizens.

That said, President Trump put out an executive order earlier this year that said he wanted different agencies, including DOJ and DHS, to prioritize finding the non-citizen voting that is happening, that does happen at a microscopic level.

And so this seems to be a move towards finding those instances.

All right, well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment.

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And we're back, and we've been talking about a federal data system known as SAVE that some states are using to make sure there are no non-citizens on their voting rolls.

Miles, the updates to SAVE come at a time when the Trump administration, as you said before, has almost singularly been focused on immigration and trying to find and remove non-citizens from voting rolls.

How are these politics affecting the way states are approaching this tool?

I mean, it's impossible to disconnect these two things, right?

I mean, this tool potentially could be useful for election officials, but it's also being managed at the very top by the President of the United States, who oversees the Department of Homeland Security.

And President Trump has made, for years, made false claims about millions of non-citizens voting in American elections, even though there has never been evidence to back that up.

I think it's important to say if SAVE works really, really well, across the board, Democratic and Republican election officials alike say they would use it, that there basically is this pocket of voters where it's kind of hard to confirm citizenship if they haven't done it already at the DMV.

And being able to use a voter's social security number to be able to do that, if it's accurate and doesn't produce bad information and the data security is legit and all these other questions, if all those questions are answered, that the tool actually would be helpful.

But many election officials are not coming within a 10-foot poll of this thing at this point, specifically because it's just unclear whether a Department of Homeland Security under President Trump is operating in good good faith.

And specifically when you talk about the connection between the Department of Justice and DHS and whether there's honesty with the election officials on how this data is being shared or used, I think there's still just a lot of open questions at this point before many election officials will jump in here.

Aaron Powell, and I think one of the open questions you're highlighting here is it's not clear if this is doing what they want it to do.

Right.

I mean, I think the early results out of Louisiana, the fact that that number coming out of Louisiana is so small from some of the experts we've talked to, that is a good first indicator.

You know, if Louisiana had run through and said we found 200,000 non-citizens on their rolls, I think that would have been a big red indicator that potentially something was wrong because it doesn't align with the other research on this topic.

It is possible, right, that this thing works well and that these 79 people found in Louisiana are actually non-citizens, but there's just been no public reporting at all on

how this thing was built and how it was tested.

Trevor Burrus, And there's a lot of concern in the voting rights community that we're hearing that there could be misuse of the tool, that people could be removed if SAVE indicates in their kind of in a preliminary response that they might be a non-citizen, that they could be taken off the rolls prematurely without due process.

And there's a lot of concern around that.

You know, I will say that the government, U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Service, which runs SAVE, you know, does in their materials make clear that states

shouldn't do that, that they have to follow certain procedures.

But there's questions about, you know, well,

who's enforcing that?

And what does that look like?

And could some eligible voters be removed because of using this tool?

So there's still a lot of questions and concerns out there, but not a lot of data yet about to know how it's being used.

And I'll also note that that's not like a hypothetical concern, right, Jude?

I mean, we saw it just last year where some election officials in some states basically took data related to this issue and deleted voters ahead of the election and then basically were ordered by courts to put them back on.

So we have seen some election officials kind of chomping at the bit to be deleting voters in the non-citizen realm before that data is 100%.

So it's not just a hypothetical issue coming from advocates.

Aaron Powell, in recent years, several states have passed laws that require people to provide proof of citizenship, things like a birth certificate or a passport.

Does the safe system replace that?

Or does it reduce the need for that sort of paperwork?

Aaron Trevor Aaron Trevor Barrett, yeah, I think that's an excellent point.

I mean, we've also seen, of course, in Trump's executive order trying to mandate proof of citizenship in the federal voter registration form as well, which has been blocked for now by courts.

But yes, I mean, this is a really interesting point that, you know, voting rights advocates worry that such requirements put a big burden on voters who don't have their birth certificate next to them when they register to vote, that this could really create huge obstacles to voters.

And we know that there's millions of people who are eligible voters who don't have those documents at the ready

and so we have talked to election officials who do applaud this idea as a much less intrusive way for them to be able to have clean voter rolls without putting a big burden on voters that it's just sort of something that happens behind the scenes with data matching and it doesn't put that big burden on the voter so it'll be interesting to see how this expanded use of save changes this policy discussion about whether we need these proof of citizenship requirements.

Miles, I want to ask ask you one last thing, which is, you know, when I first heard your reporting on this, I confused SAVE with a different database that states have been using called ERIC.

Not that long ago, you were on the pod talking about Republican states pulling out of that database.

Can you explain the difference and like who's using what at this point?

It's honestly a very valid question because I do feel like I come on here every six months and bring you like a new voting acronym that you have to memorize and realize how it works.

But I think the two things in many ways, are kind of similar, and that states are just trying to find ways to combine all of this data into something that's useful for cleaning up their roles because voters die and voters move every single day.

So it's really hard to keep those lists up to date.

So basically, ERIC, which is the system we reported on a couple years ago a lot, it was this partnership of states where states got together and said, we're going to share our roles together to be able to know when voters move, potentially be able to catch the voters that vote in two different places to be able to prosecute those people, and then also be able to get access to like really expensive federal data a little bit cheaper because you're all kind of sharing those costs.

And so what we saw after in 2023 was a number of Republican states pull out of ERIC because there was a lot of misinformation that started on a far-right website that then kind of got into the mainstream.

But what's really interesting in comparing these two data systems is that

many of the Republican states that pulled out of ERIC are many of the states that are now eagerly kind of jumping into using the save system within DHS and sending all of their data to the federal government when there are all of these outstanding questions.

And one of the big things with Eric was data security, even though that system took multiple years to develop and they put a lot of time and energy into the data security aspect of it.

It's not really clear that that same care has been taken in developing the SAVE database.

At least none of those protocols have been made public to us.

And yet many of these Republican states are kind of chomping at the bit, specifically because it's kind of led by President Trump and it aligns politically with the leaders of those states.

Yeah, I mean, this is a fascinating situation where you end up with

sort of disparate systems based on party alliances.

I mean, partisans run our voting systems.

That is just kind of a truth in American elections.

It's just kind of how it works.

All right.

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

Jude, thanks for joining us.

Well, my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

And I'm Tamar Keith.

I cover the White House.

And I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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