ProPublica: “…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…According to emails obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune, SAVE first checks SSA’s citizenship information. If that shows a voter isn’t a citizen, DHS searches other databases, but it can be difficult to locate and match all the data the systems have on a person. This can lead to errors. Broderick said in the interview that Trump’s executive order dramatically accelerated the timetable for launching SAVE, getting agencies to cooperate and move quickly. ..By September, Texas had uploaded its entire list of more than 18 million registered voters into SAVE. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming put voter data into the system, too…Jennings added that to get quick access to the Social Security data, which has been tightly guarded, USCIS partnered with DOGE. (In an unrelated matter, DOGE has since been accused of misusing Social Security data.) Jennings did not respond to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune…”