>The intent of this tool is voter suppression, so it works as designed.
That may well be the intent but, at least according to the reporting, it's not all that effective in disenfranchising many people:
Even counting people flagged in error, the first bulk searches using SAVE
haven’t validated the president’s claims that voting by noncitizens is
widespread. At least seven states with a total of about 35 million registered
voters have publicly reported the results of running their voter rolls through
the system. Those searches have identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01%
of registered voters — as noncitizens. This aligns with previous findings[0]
that noncitizens rarely register to vote[1].
The anecdotes in TFA make it clear that county clerks are seeing significant numbers of folks being flagged incorrectly and many are making efforts to verify these flags before disenfranchising anyone.
What's quite disturbing is that these folks have accessed Social Security Administration (SSA) databases to "cross-check" their information, but that data has come from (IIUC) copies of SSA data taken[2] without authorization by DOGE staffers.
All in all this is not only a huge overreach, but also validates what the experts have been saying all along: voting, or even attempting to register to vote by non-citizens is vanishingly rare.
The intent of this tool is voter suppression, so it works as designed.
>The intent of this tool is voter suppression, so it works as designed.
That may well be the intent but, at least according to the reporting, it's not all that effective in disenfranchising many people:
The anecdotes in TFA make it clear that county clerks are seeing significant numbers of folks being flagged incorrectly and many are making efforts to verify these flags before disenfranchising anyone.What's quite disturbing is that these folks have accessed Social Security Administration (SSA) databases to "cross-check" their information, but that data has come from (IIUC) copies of SSA data taken[2] without authorization by DOGE staffers.
All in all this is not only a huge overreach, but also validates what the experts have been saying all along: voting, or even attempting to register to vote by non-citizens is vanishingly rare.
[0] https://georgiarecorder.com/briefs/georgia-gop-secretary-of-...
[1] https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2025/04/03/15-noncitizen-v...
[2] https://www.csoonline.com/article/4046997/whistleblower-doge...
Original Title too long:
“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes.