Should we worry about Trump providing citizenship data to election officials?

The Department of Homeland Security is advancing its system to share citizenship verification data with state and local election officials, which has prompted “hair on fire” concerns from one legacy media outlet and a legal scholar.

Additionally, one former Biden White House official has alleged the Trump administration is creating a database to include citizens “without telling us.”

The citizenship data has been integrated with Social Security Administration information to give states and localities easier access to the data. It’s a project that the Trump administration twice announced in May and June. The move comes as three states enacted laws requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and Republicans in Congress have pushed a similar idea at the federal level.

President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” included a provision making the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system accessible to state and local governments. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced in late May that it would share the data with local election officials.

“Integration with the Social Security Administration (SSA) significantly improves the service offered by SAVE [the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system],” USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser told The Daily Signal Monday.

“Previously, SAVE required user agencies to submit a DHS-issued identifying number, such as an Alien Registration Number (A-Number) or a Certificate of Citizenship number, for each voter registrant,” he continued. He said that most state and local voting offices do not have access to these DHS numbers but they do have access to Social Security numbers.

Multiple state agencies across the United States are signed up for the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

“Now, all authorized SAVE agencies can submit cases using [a Social Security number], and SAVE will query [Social Security Administration] data,” Tragesser added. “This partnership is a game-changer, and we look forward to implementing more updates. Under the leadership of President Trump and [Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem, USCIS is moving quickly to eliminate benefit and voter fraud among the alien population.”

National Public Radio posted a story over the weekend with an alarmist tone more than a month after the administration announced it was making the data available with the headline “The Trump administration is building a national citizenship data system.”

The NPR story quoted University of Virginia School of Law professor Danielle Citron questioning if the data collection was lawful and framing it as a “hair on fire” development.

NPR, which is suing the Trump administration over cuts to its federal funding, further asserted that accessing Social Security information “turned SAVE from a tool that only responded to queries about foreign-born citizens or noncitizens into something that could comb through entire voter lists.”

In response to the NPR story, Justin Levitt, the former White House senior adviser for democracy and voting rights to President Joe Biden, wrote on the Election Law Blog, “We’ve never had a federal government database for identifying all of the citizens in the country. … Congress has never authorized the executive to create one, and has put legal limits in place to prevent the government just up and creating one without telling us.”

Such concerns are “ridiculous” and miss the point of sharing the citizenship data with state and local governments, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.

“The whole purpose of the SAVE system was to make the information available to the state agencies. The data was supposed to be available for welfare benefits. There is no reason it shouldn’t be available to election offices,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “This would determine who isn’t entitled to benefits or to voting and if they are breaking the law. To oppose that is ridiculous.”

Coordination with the Social Security Administration gives USCIS, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, a great deal of information that the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system has historically not had access to, noted Cleta Mitchell, founder and chair of the Election Integrity Network.

“The ability to upload bulk files, like voter rolls, is also a huge step forward, because the SAVE system historically has been a one-at-a-time system that also requires the alien number—which state voter rolls do not have,” Mitchell told The Daily Signal.

“We are very pleased that Secretary Noem and the team at DHS and USCIS have taken seriously the concerns of election integrity advocates and state election officials to be able to develop a system that, for the first time, can analyze state voter rolls in a manner that can identify potential noncitizens who should be contacted and asked to provide proof of citizenship,” Mitchell said.

“There should be a process for follow up and confirmation to make certain there are not mistakes,” she said. “But this would allow for a systematic review of the voter rolls to enforce the federal law which prohibits noncitizens from registering to vote or voting in a federal election.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]