Homeland Security’s citizenship agency announced a change to its database Thursday that should allow states to identify more noncitizens who are illegally registered to vote.
States can now run names in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program using Social Security numbers, rather than only using immigration numbers. Most states don’t have access to the immigration numbers but do collect Social Security numbers, Homeland Security said.
Agencies can also submit cases in batches, rather than one at a time.
“For years, states have pleaded for tools to help identify and stop aliens from hijacking our elections,” said Matthew Tragesser, spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which operates SAVE. “Under the leadership of President Trump and [DHS] Secretary [Kristi] Noem, USCIS is moving quickly to eliminate voter fraud.”
J. Christian Adams, a voting integrity expert and head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said the change will allow states to poke into an area that had been a blind spot.
“Before you had to have the alien number and that is not necessarily going to detect everybody,” he said. “It’s going to allow states to find a lot more noncitizens.”
Homeland Security earlier this year announced that it was eliminating a fee for running names through SAVE.
The issue of noncitizen voting is heatedly debated.
Voting rights groups say the problem is so rare as to be close to nonexistent, given the size of U.S. elections.
But the Trump administration has been spotting cases and filing criminal charges in some of them, making clear that it does actually happen.
