An immigration think tank is calling for Congress to consider mandating the use of a citizenship verification for voter registration after the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to make the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements more user-friendly for state and local election offices.
Last week, the DHS settled a case with four states–Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio—to overhaul the citizenship verification system.
The report, which the Center for Immigration Studies published Monday, characterizes the 1993 National Voter Registration Act as “fatally flawed,” claiming that it “not only facilitates vote fraud but also results in legal aliens mistakenly voting and putting themselves at risk.”
“Congress should revisit the NVRA’s prohibition against officials ‘mak[ing] any statement … or tak[ing] any action the purpose or effect of which is to discourage … applicant[s] from registering to vote’ to allow for discouraging non-citizens from registering,” CIS Senior Legal Fellow George Fishman writes in the report. “In addition, Congress should encourage, or to the extent possible mandate, states to utilize the SAVE program to verify the citizenship status of voters and applicants to register.”
Settlement With States
The new settlement requires the federal government to modernize the citizenship verification tools so every state and territory—not just the four litigants—can more easily prevent non-citizens from voting.
“This agreement will continue U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ efforts to improve the SAVE program for states to combat voter fraud, protect election integrity, and verify immigration and citizenship status for state benefits and programs,” Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told The Daily Signal in a statement.
“The Department of Homeland Security urges all states to adopt SAVE and join us in enforcing the law and safeguarding the voting rights of American citizens,” McLaughlin added.
The DHS committed to making upgrades to SAVE that include free verification services for all state and local governments; allow for verification using full Social Security numbers or use the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The settlement allows for states to do bulk uploads to process verifications more efficiently, which eliminates the need for one-by-one manual entries. The four states entered into an information sharing agreement.
The SAVE system was established in 1987 to help state and local governments to verify if someone was legally eligible for social service benefits using the alien identification numbers assigned by the federal government.
“It’s silly that the Left freaks out about data sharing about this. State government agencies interact with federal data all the time,” Logan Churchwell, research director at the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “They are more afraid of getting ripped off on welfare benefits but not afraid someone would steal votes and elect politicians that would vote on welfare policy.”
In March, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The order included a provision making SAVE data accessible for state and local governments using a Social Security number to crosscheck citizenship status—instead of only alien ID numbers—as a means to prevent illegal voting or illegal voter registration.
The system wasn’t easy to use, Churchwell noted.
“Election officials would have to look at one name at a time. Trump got rid of the alien ID number requirement, and allowed [them] to run a search with Social Security numbers,” Churchwell said. “Now some states will be able to run just the last four digits of a Social Security number.”
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which represents a coalition of liberal groups, has opposed the reforms. Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, the conference’s vice president for the Center for Civil Rights and Technology, opposes SAVE in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security.
“Members of our coalition, including the ACLU and the Brennan Center for Justice, condemned SAVE,” says Montoya-Boyer’s letter to Homeland Security Chief Privacy Officer Roman Jankowski. “They recognized that it could disenfranchise voters by effectively ending online or mail voter registration and by pushing eligible voters off the voting rolls. Subsequently, privacy and civil society advocates filed a lawsuit in opposition to the SAVE system.”
‘Obama … Showed It Could Be Done’
In 2011, the Obama administration’s Justice Department under then-Attorney General Eric Holder gave pre-clearance to SAVE under the Voting Rights Act.
North Carolina had approached the DHS saying it had noncitizens with driver’s licenses from the state DMV who were registered to vote.
The verification database for voting wasn’t controversial in the past, Churchwell said.
“The Holder DOJ gave pre-clearance to North Carolina to use the SAVE system. North Carolina was the first state to kick in the door,” Churchwell told The Daily Signal. “The Obama administration DOJ and DHS showed it could be done under the Voting Rights Act.”
In November, the Trump administration scored a preliminary court victory when Joe Biden-appointed Judge Sparkle Sooknanan declined to halt the citizenship verification database, and allowed it to remain continue to be accessible for states to cross-check voter registration data. The League of Women Voters was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in September alleging the database information was unreliable and could be used to purge legally eligible voters from the voter rolls.
