“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes.
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback.
Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate.
The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.
At Trump’s direction, DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. Many of the nation’s Republican secretaries of state have eagerly embraced the experiment, agreeing to upload all or part of their rolls.
But an examination of SAVE’s rollout by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reveals that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data and before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information.
As a result, SAVE has made persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing the status of people born outside the U.S., data gathered from local election administrators, interviews and emails obtained via public records requests show. Some of those people subsequently become U.S. citizens, a step that the system doesn’t always pick up.
According to correspondence between state and federal officials, DHS has had to correct information provided to at least five states after SAVE misidentified some voters as noncitizens.
Texas and Missouri were among the first states to try the augmented tool.
In Missouri, state officials acted on SAVE’s findings before attempting to confirm them, directing county election administrators to make voters flagged as potential noncitizens temporarily unable to vote. But in hundreds of cases, the tool’s determinations were wrong, our review found. Lennon was among dozens of clerks statewide who raised alarms about the system’s errors.
“It really does not help my confidence,” she said, “that the information we are trying to use to make really important decisions, like the determination of voter eligibility, is so inaccurate.”
In Texas, news reports began emerging about voters being mistakenly flagged as noncitizens soon after state officials announced the results of running the state’s voter roll through SAVE in October.
Our reporting showed these errors were more widespread than previously known, involving at least 87 voters across 29 counties. County election administrators suspect there may be more. Confusion took hold when the Texas …
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback.
Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate.
The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.
At Trump’s direction, DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. Many of the nation’s Republican secretaries of state have eagerly embraced the experiment, agreeing to upload all or part of their rolls.
But an examination of SAVE’s rollout by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reveals that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data and before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information.
As a result, SAVE has made persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing the status of people born outside the U.S., data gathered from local election administrators, interviews and emails obtained via public records requests show. Some of those people subsequently become U.S. citizens, a step that the system doesn’t always pick up.
According to correspondence between state and federal officials, DHS has had to correct information provided to at least five states after SAVE misidentified some voters as noncitizens.
Texas and Missouri were among the first states to try the augmented tool.
In Missouri, state officials acted on SAVE’s findings before attempting to confirm them, directing county election administrators to make voters flagged as potential noncitizens temporarily unable to vote. But in hundreds of cases, the tool’s determinations were wrong, our review found. Lennon was among dozens of clerks statewide who raised alarms about the system’s errors.
“It really does not help my confidence,” she said, “that the information we are trying to use to make really important decisions, like the determination of voter eligibility, is so inaccurate.”
In Texas, news reports began emerging about voters being mistakenly flagged as noncitizens soon after state officials announced the results of running the state’s voter roll through SAVE in October.
Our reporting showed these errors were more widespread than previously known, involving at least 87 voters across 29 counties. County election administrators suspect there may be more. Confusion took hold when the Texas …
“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes.
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback.
Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate.
The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.
At Trump’s direction, DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. Many of the nation’s Republican secretaries of state have eagerly embraced the experiment, agreeing to upload all or part of their rolls.
But an examination of SAVE’s rollout by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reveals that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data and before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information.
As a result, SAVE has made persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing the status of people born outside the U.S., data gathered from local election administrators, interviews and emails obtained via public records requests show. Some of those people subsequently become U.S. citizens, a step that the system doesn’t always pick up.
According to correspondence between state and federal officials, DHS has had to correct information provided to at least five states after SAVE misidentified some voters as noncitizens.
Texas and Missouri were among the first states to try the augmented tool.
In Missouri, state officials acted on SAVE’s findings before attempting to confirm them, directing county election administrators to make voters flagged as potential noncitizens temporarily unable to vote. But in hundreds of cases, the tool’s determinations were wrong, our review found. Lennon was among dozens of clerks statewide who raised alarms about the system’s errors.
“It really does not help my confidence,” she said, “that the information we are trying to use to make really important decisions, like the determination of voter eligibility, is so inaccurate.”
In Texas, news reports began emerging about voters being mistakenly flagged as noncitizens soon after state officials announced the results of running the state’s voter roll through SAVE in October.
Our reporting showed these errors were more widespread than previously known, involving at least 87 voters across 29 counties. County election administrators suspect there may be more. Confusion took hold when the Texas …
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