Until 8 p.m. includes Twin Cities area

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Tens of millions of voters have had their citizenship status and other information checked using a revamped tool offered by the Trump administration, even as many states — led by both Democrats and Republicans — are refusing or hesitating to use it because of outstanding questions about the system.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says election officials have used the tool to check the information of more than 33 million voters — a striking portion of the American public, considering little information has been made public about the tool's accuracy or data security.

The latest update to the system, known as SAVE, took effect Aug. 15 and allows election officials to use just the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers — along with names and dates of birth — to check if the voters are U.S. citizens, or if they have died.

The upgrade makes the tool far more accessible, since it now aligns with the information most states collect or have access to for most voters. But the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses USCIS, has not responded to questions about the system from members of Congress, and numerous election officials NPR spoke with expressed concern about what else the Trump administration could do with the data it acquires from states.

"There's still uncertainty about what is happening, what happens to the data that are shared with USCIS," said Charles Stewart, a political science professor who directs the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. "I don't know if this means that the USCIS now has a depository of one-sixth of all [the country's] registered voters."

In recent months, several Republican-led states have brokered 

 agreements with USCIS to use SAVE, or announced the 

 from their rolls thousands of inactive voters that SAVE identified as deceased. And Louisiana's secretary of state 

 that officials identified 79 likely noncitizens who had voted in at least one election since the 1980s, after running nearly all of the state's 2.9 million registered voters through SAVE.

DHS is encouraging officials in other states to upload data to the system — even going so far as to make millions of dollars of grant money 

But USCIS did not respond to NPR's questions about what happens to the data states upload and who has access to it.

And officials in other GOP-led states have expressed caution about using the system.

Last month, North Carolina's Republican-controlled state election board did not take up an offer by USCIS to participate in a "soft launch" of the upgraded tool. Spokesperson Patrick Gannon told NPR in a statement that state officials are pursuing "agreements to ensure that proper safeguards would be in place to protect and secure the data, if a decision is ultimately made to use the service."

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, told NPR the upgraded SAVE seemed like a "fantastic tool," but he still has questions before he can run his voter list through it to ensure it is authorized under state law.

"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?" Watson told NPR last month. "I don't want to do something that I don't necessarily have the ability to do without legislative authority. So we just want to be very clear on that before we move forward."

SAVE concerns are compounded by other Trump moves on elections

The push for states to use the upgraded data system comes as the Trump administration is taking unprecedented steps to assert control over elections as well as collect and 

Numerous voting officials told NPR they felt the revamped SAVE tool could be useful for confirming citizenship status without encumbering voters, and many Democrats also acknowledged the efforts by Trump's USCIS to work in a bipartisan fashion.

But concerns about SAVE are compounded by other moves by President Trump's administration. Trump continues to make 

 about widespread noncitizen voting, has 

attempted to change voter registration rules

 to include proof-of-citizenship requirements, and has directed the Justice Department to 

prioritize prosecuting noncitizens who register or vote

a person who spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election

As part of the administration's stated aim to crack down on noncitizen voting, USCIS prioritized updating the data system known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, that state and federal agencies have for decades used to query DHS databases to determine if foreign-born individuals are eligible for various benefits.

The agency, working with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, made SAVE free to states and allowed bulk searches, as opposed to looking up one person at a time — changes that were celebrated by many voting officials.

"It's getting access to data that already exists and just making it so [election officials] can more easily compare things without making it hard for voters," said Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican who has begun testing out SAVE's upgraded capabilities. "I'm trying to make it easier for voters while also doing these validations."

In May, USCIS linked data from the Social Security Administration, allowing election officials for the first time to check the citizenship of many U.S.-born citizens with the voter's name, date of birth and nine-digit Social Security number. NPR was the first news outlet to 

The integration with Social Security Administration data also means SAVE can show if someone appears on that agency's Death Master File.

Since most states only collect the last four digits of Social Security numbers from voters, the latest upgrade swung open the door for many more states to use SAVE. USCIS says almost 80% of the 33 million voters validated via SAVE were run through the system since the Aug. 15 change.

In mid-July, California Sen. Alex Padilla and two other Democratic U.S. senators 

 information on the updated SAVE system from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, including the accuracy rate of the SAVE program, what data USCIS stores and who has access, and whether the agency is following protocols spelled out in federal privacy laws.

The senators asked for answers by July 29 but have not heard back.

"In light of the president's threats to issue unconstitutional executive orders to interfere with state elections, DHS owes Congress and the public some basic transparency about what they are doing with state voter rolls," Padilla told NPR.

SAVE pings a number of data sources, as opposed to being a database in and of itself. But under USCIS policy, all queries are saved for 10 years for audit purposes, so if a state runs its whole voter list through the tool, that data will remain with DHS for a decade.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, told NPR that such a system sounded like the beginnings of 

 that would raise privacy and security concerns.

"They said they're going to keep our data for 10 years," Bellows said. "If [former Attorney General] Merrick Garland were asking for this or President Biden, I have to think that the red states would be calling for their heads."

 that states sign to use SAVE include a clause that grants DHS permission to use information from states "for any purpose permitted by law, including, but not limited to, the prosecution of violations of Federal administrative or criminal law."

At a White House meeting about SAVE in late July, USCIS officials tried to reassure state voting officials about sharing sensitive voter data, according to Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, who attended the meeting.

"They said many times like, 'Look, we know the states are in charge of elections. We don't want your data. We don't want your lists,' " Thomas recalled.

But in recent weeks, the Department of Justice has been making 

 to numerous states to turn over such data, including in several instances voter rolls that include personal data like driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

Thomas, a Democrat, said that when a Republican secretary of state pointed out the DOJ's voter data demands to USCIS officials, the officials responded that they worked for a separate agency.

‘The worst thing you can get is a false positive’

USCIS hasn't publicized detailed evidence about the accuracy of the tool or shared what testing went into the program before it was released to states, though it asserts SAVE's accuracy has markedly improved with the recent upgrades.

 and some election officials are voicing concerns that eligible voters could face barriers to casting ballots or be improperly removed from the rolls if states over-rely on incomplete information from SAVE.

USCIS acknowledges that certain categories of people who acquired U.S. citizenship, such as some foreign-born children of U.S. citizens, cannot be verified by SAVE.

Furthermore, data matching in elections is notoriously difficult and there are questions about the completeness of the Social Security Administration's citizenship data USCIS is relying on.

Wesley Wilcox, a Republican elections supervisor in Marion County, Fla., signed an agreement this summer giving his county access to SAVE. But he said he plans to double check any data he gets from the system, since he's encountered multiple instances in which SSA data indicated a person was dead when they weren't.

"It's like any new process that you put into effect … we're going to do that legwork," Wilcox said. "I want to be as accurate as humanly possible at all times."

For a portion of foreign-born individuals, SAVE prompts user agencies to submit more information, such as a person's naturalization certificate number or alien registration number, for their case to be manually reviewed. USCIS told NPR that of the 33 million voters submitted to the upgraded SAVE so far, less than 1% have required that manual review. The agency did not respond to NPR's question about the results of the manual review, how many noncitizens on voter rolls have been identified to date or what portion of the results so far were inconclusive.

While USCIS' materials say election officials are not supposed to reject voter registrations or remove voters from the rolls if the SAVE system asks for more voter information, it is not yet clear if there are consequences if states skip those steps.

Last year, thousands of U.S. citizens in 

 were removed from the rolls or deactivated after election officials relied on imperfect data to identify suspected noncitizens.

Conservative election integrity advocates have broadly 

 SAVE's development, but among some, there is also an acknowledgement that states need to be cautious when removing people from voter rolls.

"I am hopeful that a great deal of care and a great deal of contemplation is going into this process because the worst thing you can get is a false positive," said J. Christian Adams, president of the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation. "The worst thing you could do, as some states have done in the past, is remove a citizen from the voter rolls as a noncitizen. That should not happen."

 Adams to apologize to a group of Virginia voters his organization incorrectly claimed were noncitizens.

The most in-depth data about how the updated SAVE is working came last week from Louisiana.

The state's Republican secretary of state, Nancy Landry, told reporters that by using SAVE, her office identified 390 people on the voter rolls who they believe are noncitizens. Seventy-nine of them were found to have voted. Landry said there was a review of each suspected noncitizen and her office worked with the FBI to investigate their citizenship status.

"They have been given notice we have reason to believe they are not a U.S. citizen," Landry said. "They have the opportunity to come in and provide documentation that they are in fact a U.S. citizen."

Anyone who does not respond or provide proof within 21 days is removed from the rolls, Landry said, and noncitizens who registered to vote — regardless of whether they were among the 79 who voted in recent decades — will be referred for criminal prosecution.

The number of suspected noncitizens Louisiana found to have voted amounts to less than 0.003% of the state's registered voters, a percentage that aligns with what 

"The very small numbers suggest that the results are what we expected, and that they are not alarming," said Stewart of MIT.

He added that number might shrink further as some people may prove to be citizens.

Yet even as there are signs the SAVE program is generating helpful data, Stewart said it is troubling that USCIS is withholding answers to key questions, like what happens to the data that is uploaded or detailed breakdowns on SAVE results so far.

In Minnesota, state voting officials would need a change to state law to use SAVE for elections. But Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said he won't push for such a change until he has more clarity on how it works.

"Certainly it's impressive what they've done in a short period of time," Simon said. "[But] I'd want to see a lot more by way of testing and assurances about the accuracy before we would be a willing and enthusiastic participant."

Politics and Government News

Homepage

Jude Joffe-Block

Author

Miles Parks

Tens of millions of voters have had their information run through the tool — a striking portion of the U.S. public, considering little has been made public about the tool's accuracy or data security.

33 million voters have been run through a Trump administration citizenship check

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox