According to an email reportedly sent from the Department of Homeland Security, the Trump administration quietly sought to “soft launch” modified features of a high-tech tool it’s using to gather election data that many people fear could be weaponized to fuel the president’s false conspiracy theories about election fraud.
The email, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC, was reportedly sent last week by a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official to a lawyer for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, inviting North Carolina to test “exciting new features” of a federal database that the Trump administration has retrofitted to try to support its thoroughly debunked claims that Democrats have relied on illegal votes from noncitizens to sway elections.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database is known as SAVE. Basically, it’s a federal database previously used for tracking entitlement benefits that has been perverted into an election-monitoring tool. SAVE combines federal immigration and crime data, along with data on state voter rolls and personal information like Social Security numbers, to target people deemed ineligible to vote, including alleged noncitizens.
As Democracy Docket noted, the new upgrade “allows election officials to use just the last four digits of a social security number — rather than requiring all nine — along with the individual’s name and date of birth when submitting a citizenship check request.”
And according to The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, the state’s GOP-controlled elections board is considering handing data over to the federal government to be fed into the tool:
The board is “doing due diligence to ensure that if we provide the voter rolls to the federal government that that information is safeguarded, protected and only used and seen by the people that are working on that project,” spokesperson Pat Gannon said.
Also, according to the Brennan Center, the Trump administration has issued demands for voter information from nearly two dozen other states.
Considering the administration’s false claims about crime and immigration, the reports of American citizens being ensnared in President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdowns, the administration’s interests in rapidly denaturalizing some citizens, and the tendency for voter roll purges to disenfranchise nonwhite voters, there’s reason to worry that a tool like SAVE — which could be riddled with errors — will be used to promote Trump’s false claims about election fraud or to limit Americans’ voter eligibility.
Those concerns are laid out by numerous experts in this CyberScoop report from June, which quotes a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as saying the database will be used to “help identify and stop aliens from hijacking our elections” — essentially parroting Trump.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment. It’s unclear whether similar emails have been sent to election officials in other states.
And it’s certainly worth noting here that any data retrieved from states using this tool would fall under the purview of Heather Honey, the pro-Trump election denier who distorted voter data in a dubious effort to try to help overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss — and was recently appointed to oversee “election integrity” at DHS.
