NPR broke the news over the weekend that the Department of Homeland Security has teamed up with the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency to build a centralized citizenship database, complete with Social Security and immigration data.
The Trump administration is pretending that this was done for the benefit of state and local election officials, to give them a one-stop shop to verify the citizenship status of voters.
About that …
First, this effort sounds an awful lot like the same thing WIRED reported roughly two months ago. That’s not meant as a slam on NPR’s reporting, but rather on the Trump administration’s transparent efforts at repackaging what was once clearly intended to be a tool to track immigrants, all in the service of terrorizing them.
Back then, DOGE was uploading IRS, Social Security, and voting data to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database. This was around the same time that the Trump administration purposely marked 6,100 immigrants as dead, despite knowing that they were very much alive. The goal? To prevent immigrants from earning wages.
This time around, DOGE still has access to federal databases, ignoring the Privacy Act of 1974, which limits how government employees can use private data and prohibits sharing it between agencies unless the subject of the data is notified and consents.
Even if we pretend that election security is the real goal behind letting DOGE run wild, framing this as some sort of assistance to election officials is absurd. It’s just part of President Donald Trump’s theory that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 had non-citizens not voted illegally and that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The conjoined database is just a high-tech way of doing what Trump tried to do during his first term, when he convened his Election Fraud Commission to demand that every state send complete voter data—to an insecure email address, of course. After a little more than a year, the commission packed up, having failed to find any widespread voter fraud, much less the millions of non-citizens who Trump alleged voted illegally.
No matter how many times Republicans insist that non-citizens are voting, it’s actually extremely rare, and it certainly doesn’t happen enough to alter an election outcome. The GOP’s repeated attempts to remove the thousands and thousands of alleged non-citizens from voter rolls tend to result in a lot of citizens getting removed instead.
A citizenship database also tracks what Trump was trying to do with his March executive order that forced states to agree to Trump’s fraud theories or lose federal funding. People would need written proof of citizenship to vote, and mail-in ballots received after Election Day would not be counted. Those provisions have been blocked by a federal judge, but hey, why not just build a citizenship database anyway?
Election officials already have an effective method of checking voter registration data through the Electronic Registration Information Center. But after Trump’s efforts to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, several red states withdrew from ERIC when right-wing conspiracy theorists decided that it was “woke.”
If the citizenship database really was intended to ease the burden of state election officials, having the feral rodents of DOGE build it was never going to result in sound data. DOGE employees are the same people who, when asked to review which Department of Veterans Affairs contract should be canceled, decided to let AI handle it.
Now those geniuses have done a quick and dirty compilation of private government data to track citizenship. Surely nothing will go wrong.