DHS Agrees to Overhaul Federal Immigration System for Mass Voter Screenings

In a sweeping settlement with four Republican-led states, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has agreed to redesign its federal immigration database to serve voter “verification” purposes — a dramatic expansion of federal data that voting rights advocates have long warned could supercharge wrongful purges and threaten voter privacy.

The agreement, filed in federal court last week, compels DHS to retrofit the decades-old Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program — a system built to determine eligibility for federal public benefits, not citizenship status or voting eligibility.

Under pressure from Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio, DHS will now make SAVE capable of mass, automated citizenship checks using Social Security numbers and state driver’s license data, despite long-standing warnings that the system is structurally ill-suited for voter verification and prone to flagging U.S. citizens as potential noncitizens.

“Within 90 days of the execution of this Settlement Agreement, and consistent with any new ISA, representatives from each State Plaintiff (i.e., Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana) may provide Defendants with 1,000 randomly selected driver’s license records from their state (including First Name, Last Name, Date of Birth, Driver’s License Number or State Identification Number, and State of issuance), for which verification is requested, and for assistance in developing and improving functionality for SAVE by making state-level data available to SAVE,” the settlement reads.


https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/dhs-agrees-to-overhaul-federal-immigration-system-for-mass-voter-screenings/