The Justice Department is reportedly putting together a gigantic and unprecedented data base of national voter information — and it could help President Donald Trump’s efforts to deny the 2020 election results or cast doubt on future elections.
Plenty of studies indicate that noncitizen voting is so vanishingly rare that it poses no threat to election integrity.
The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that the “Justice Department is compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.” The Times reports that the initiative has proceeded through efforts at both the Justice Department’s civil rights division and criminal division, “seeking data about individual voters across the country, including names and addresses, in a move that experts say may violate the law.”
Plenty of studies indicate that noncitizen voting is so vanishingly rare that it poses no threat to election integrity. For example, after the 2016 elections, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigration populations and found a suspected noncitizen voting rate of 0.0001%.
Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official who’s an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, likens DOJ’s efforts to Trump deploying the National Guard to handle domestic law enforcement. He told the Times, “It’s wading in, without authorization and against the law, with an overly heavy federal hand to take over a function that states are actually doing just fine.” He described the reported effort as “wildly illegal” and “deeply troubling” and said “nobody asked for this.”
In what appears to be a related effort to ostensibly identify noncitizen voting, NPR reports that election officials have checked the citizenship status and other information of more than 33 million voters through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program. Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, expressed concerns about the SAVE searches in an email to MSNBC: It is possible someone could manipulate or misinterpret the results of SAVE searches to peddle disinformation about voter fraud and undermine faith in our elections. It is also possible that the data could be misused. There is a reason we have a Privacy Act, which places requirements on the federal government before it amasses private personal data on American citizens. Recent reporting on errors by DOGE indicate the danger of that personal information getting into the wrong hands or being misused. Trump, of course, doesn’t hew to the truth when he denies election results. But armed with more information, his efforts to cast doubt on election results or manufacture narratives about massive noncitizen voting could become more sophisticated.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter.
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