While Congress Delays, Admin Takes Action On Noncitizen Voting

On Nov. 28, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security entered a settlement to resolve litigation with four states. The lawsuit was originally brought against the Biden administration over its alleged stonewalling of election authorities seeking federal records necessary to rid their voter rolls of suspected noncitizens.

Once the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida signs off on the settlement, election integrity will be strengthened not only in the Sunshine State, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana — its co-plaintiffs — but nationwide.

It marks the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken to enable states to ensure that only citizens are voting — efforts made vital in the aftermath of the Biden-led illegal immigration invasion, and with Congress yet to pass the SAVE Act, which would require registrants to provide documentary proof of citizenship.

Under the settlement, the federal government affirmed its pledge to dramatically increase the capability, functionality, and accessibility of DHS’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements or SAVE program. Historically, SAVE (not to be confused with the pending bill of the same name) allowed authorities to search for the citizenship and immigration statuses of applicants for benefits or licenses.

But the system was subject to a variety of limitations. Each query required state authorities and other users to include both biographic information and a federally issued immigration number — a number that many states do not possess. States could only cross-reference data with DHS’s immigration records, not compare it with information held by other agencies that might reveal citizenship status. They could only run queries on one individual at a time and had to pay the federal government for those queries. And federal authorities only granted a limited number of states access to the SAVE tool in the first place, with some allegedly finding their requests slow-walked — akin to the charges leveled by the four state plaintiffs in their litigation with DHS.

Improving the Service

The settlement remedies many of these issues. Within 60 days after the court signs off on the agreement, DHS has vowed that the SAVE service will be free, integrated with the Social Security Administration so that states can use full or partial Social Security numbers in lieu of alien identifiers in queries, and capable of running queries through bulk uploads.

The government has said it may study whether SAVE could be enhanced, or another system could be used, to allow states to seek U.S. citizenship or immigration status information simply by providing a first and last name and date of birth.

The states party to the case may also provide driver’s license records, including numbers, to help the SAVE program improve functionality, pointing to DHS efforts to incorporate such identifiers into the program, as driver’s license numbers are commonly used to register to vote.

The court is to retain jurisdiction over the settlement for 20 years to ensure it is enforced — making it difficult perhaps for a future president to hinder the SAVE system or its use.

Trump Administration Action

The terms of the settlement are consistent with a series of initiatives the Trump administration has taken to convert SAVE into a voter verification hub, pursuant to several executive orders the president issued touching on election integrity and federal-state cooperation on ensuring clean voter rolls.

In April, DHS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and DOGE announced SAVE had undergone a “comprehensive optimization” to make it the “single, reliable source for verifying non-citizen status nationwide.”

That overhaul, the entities said, “eliminates fees for database searches, breaks down silos for accurate results, streamlines mass status checks, and integrates criminal records, immigration timelines, and addresses. Automatic status updates and a user-friendly interface will empower federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal agencies to prevent non-citizens from exploiting taxpayer benefits or voting illegally.”

In May, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it had partnered with the Social Security Administration to allow users to verify citizenship or immigration status using Social Security numbers, instead of DHS identifiers. Months later, in November, as reflected in the settlement, USCIS announced that users could enter simply the last four digits of an individual’s Social Security number as part of a query.

SAVE’s ability to access source databases maintained by the Justice Department is another enhancement that took place this year — one consistent with the Trump administration’s broader efforts to combat immigration-linked crimes, including election-related ones, by eliminating “information silos” within agencies, as I reported earlier this year for RealClearInvestigations.

But perhaps the most significant development came in late October, when the administration issued a notice regarding its overhaul of SAVE to include not only relevant Social Security information, but passport numbers and, most importantly for voter verification purposes, driver’s license numbers.

When using a driver’s license number, the notice indicates, “SAVE will use state driver’s licensing agencies or another source (such as NLETS) to validate the information and gain access to other government enumerators. This will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship.”

This feature, however, was not live when the notice was issued. The DHS settlement points to the fact that functionality is being piloted and will likely require state cooperation.

Democrats and like-minded progressive nongovernmental organizations have challenged these efforts publicly and in court, raising concerns about privacy violations, challenging these efforts on technical grounds, and claiming SAVE is deficient and will lead to people being unduly removed from the voter rolls.

They have done so despite — and a cynic might argue because of — recent revelations wherein:

• Texas identified 2,724 potential noncitizens on its rolls;
• Ohio identified 1,084 noncitizens who attempted to have registered to vote unlawfully in Ohio;
• Iowa confirmed that 277 noncitizens voted or were registered to vote.

This is on top of historical evidence of still thousands more non-citizens potentially residing on state voter rolls.

More States Use SAVE Program

To this point, the Trump administration has prevailed. And the number of states making use of the new and improved SAVE program has risen from just five a year ago, to at least 26 as of this writing.

And with good reason. It is a scandal that number is not 50 states. With no federal mandate for voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship for registration, most states allow people to register to vote without providing any government-issued identification number. Many states also permit non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses, the numbers of which can be used to register to vote. Social Security numbers may also be used to register to vote. Those numbers have been issued to millions of non-citizens. Meanwhile, illegal aliens often steal or fabricate and unknowingly use extant Social Security numbers of others to work. Some may have registered to vote using those pilfered IDs.

With states unable to verify citizenship under the current system, and no searchable comprehensive database of everyone in America legally or illegally, the Trump administration is trying to do what it can with what it has to ensure states have clean voter rolls.

Combined with efforts from the Justice Department to ensure states clean their voter rolls more broadly, and the Trump administration’s push to close the border, deport illegal aliens, and cause millions more to self-deport, it is striking a blow against the most pernicious form of foreign influence in our elections.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.