The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.
The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.
NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.
For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources.
Now, the Department of Homeland Security is offering another way.
DHS, in partnership with the White House's Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) team, has recently rolled out a series of upgrades to a network of federal databases to allow state and county election officials to quickly check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists — both U.S.-born and naturalized citizens — using data from the Social Security Administration as well as immigration databases.
Such integration has never existed before, and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens — something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database of Americans' personal information has long been considered a third rail — especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal government.
Legal experts told NPR they were alarmed that a development of this magnitude was already underway without a transparent and public process.
"That is a debate that needs to play out in a public setting," said John Davisson, the director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's one that deserves public scrutiny and sunlight, that deserves the participation of elected representatives, that deserves opportunities for the public to weigh in through public comment and testimony."
When federal agencies plan to collect or use Americans' personal data in new ways, there are procedures they are required to follow beforehand, including giving public notice.
Another privacy expert, University of Virginia School of Law professor Danielle Citron, called this data aggregation effort a "hair on fire" development. She told NPR she has questions if the project itself is lawful.
Many other questions about the new system remain, including which states plan to use it and how, what sort of data security measures are being taken and how trustworthy the data the tool provides will be. It's also unknown what the federal government plans to do with the voter records after they've been run through the system.
The recent history of elections is littered with failed data matching efforts, often driven by false fraud narratives, which have entangled eligible voters. The first Trump administration attempted the beginnings of a similar data project, though the effort shuttered after most states balked at sharing their voter data.
The fact that the development and rollout follow Trump's falsehoods about widespread noncitizen voting makes election experts wary of how this new tool will work.
"We've never had a list of U.S. citizens to compare our voter registration lists to," said Kim Wyman, the former Republican secretary of state of Washington who is now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "It seems like it takes the federal government more than just [a few] months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that's going to be accurate … That's what my concern is, just first and foremost, that the list is accurate."
Everyone registering to vote must swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are a U.S. citizen. The consequences for noncitizens who try to vote include fines, prison time and deportation. Officials say that deterrent is why cases of ineligible people casting ballots are incredibly rare — a fact that's become increasingly apparent as more and more states devote resources to uncovering the few people that slip through the cracks every election. Research has also shown that when noncitizens do vote, it's often not to commit fraud but rather because they misunderstood eligibility rules.
President Trump and his allies have continued to emphasize the issue. The Justice Department has prioritized its prosecution and Republican lawmakers are pushing new legislation at both the national and state level to require people show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
If this new tool is successful, it could provide local and state governments a powerful method to check the citizenship of almost all Americans without additional documentation requirements.
"Taking that burden of proof, if you will, off the voter … is a good thing," said Wyman, who also worked for the Department of Homeland Security on election security issues in the Biden administration.
But she noted that a national citizenship list and anything resembling a national voter registration list have been controversial ideas for a long time, so the Trump administration is wading into uncharted waters.
"All of us that live in this free country and this free society want to believe that there are some privacy rights that are still being upheld in our lives," Wyman said. "The attention to detail matters here in many, many big ways."
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which is under the Department of Homeland Security, is managing the tool. The agency did not provide more information about how it will work when contacted by NPR. In a statement, spokesman Matthew Tragesser called the development a "game changer" and said the agency looks forward to "implementing more updates."
"USCIS is moving quickly to eliminate benefit and voter fraud among the alien population," Tragesser said.
What SAVE did and what it does now
This new citizenship check capability comes from a massive expansion of a tool voting officials only used sparingly in the past.
The tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, is a system of DHS databases that state and federal agencies have queried since the 1980s to check the immigration status of noncitizens living in the U.S. legally. Agencies can then decide if the applicants are eligible for different government benefits.
For roughly the past decade, some voting officials have also used SAVE to check the citizenship of voters on their rolls, usually in instances where department of motor vehicle records indicated a voter is a noncitizen, since those records often aren't updated when a person naturalizes. Election officials could use SAVE to get a more recent immigration snapshot, which would either verify that a person had become a citizen and was indeed eligible to vote, or if no naturalization record was found, indicate to the official that they should reach out to the voter about whether they are a citizen.
But using SAVE for this sort of verification was unwieldy.
Election officials across the political spectrum complained they did not have the specific immigration identification numbers needed to query the system, and in cases where they did, it was expensive and labor intensive to submit one query at a time. Ahead of the 2024 election, some Republican-led states ramped up their complaints about the inadequacies of the tool. Just weeks before the election, Texas, Florida and Ohio sued DHS, arguing the Biden administration was failing to help states verify their voters' citizenship.
USCIS began planning upgrades to the system at the end of the Biden administration, according to a person who attended a briefing where it was discussed but was not authorized to speak to the media. After Trump took office, DHS began a series of regular calls with some state election staffers to talk through potential updates.
A key turning point came in March, when Trump signed an executive order that made sweeping changes to voting and election protocols, including requiring DHS to allow states "access to appropriate systems" for verifying the citizenship of voters on their rolls without a cost, and instructing DOGE to assist the agency in combing voter rolls for noncitizens.
The order also instructed the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting non-citizens who register to vote, whether they actually voted or not, using "databases or information maintained by the Department of Homeland Security."
Within weeks, USCIS began announcing rolling upgrades to SAVE, crediting DOGE with the changes. On April 22, the agency revealed SAVE was now free for non-federal agencies, and could handle mass checks. Then, a May 22 news release announced SAVE had integrated data from the Social Security Administration so election officials could query it with a nine-digit Social Security Number.
Though the May news release didn't mention it explicitly, the Social Security change meant for the first time SAVE could verify the citizenship of U.S.-born Americans with a valid Social Security number, which nearly every American citizen has.
That development is a major move that turned SAVE from a tool that only responded to queries about foreign-born citizens or noncitizens into something that could comb through entire voter lists. But numerous state voting officials NPR spoke with were not aware that capability was part of the updates.
As recently as late April, a USCIS fact sheet about using SAVE for voting records said the opposite. "SAVE does not verify U.S. born citizens under any circumstances. SAVE does not access databases that contain U.S.-born citizen information," the web page read, according to a snapshot captured by the Internet Archive.
That has now been changed. In a version that was last updated in June, the fact sheet now says that looking up U.S.-born citizens is possible with a Social Security Number. "SAVE is able in many cases to verify U.S.-born U.S. citizens for voter verification purposes, through information accessed through the SSA," it reads. NPR has not yet spoken to a state voting official who has looked up a U.S.-born citizen on the new SAVE platform.
Social Security Administration data systems can show whether an applicant was a citizen or a noncitizen at the time they received their number, said Kathleen Romig, a former SSA official who works at the liberal-leaning policy nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Department of Homeland Security has combined that point-in-time citizenship information, with SAVE's ability to more thoroughly tell whether a person has naturalized, to create a system that voting officials can use to theoretically nail down citizenship status for voters they have Social Security numbers for.
Upon hearing the details, numerous voting data experts told NPR it sounded like a system that could work. The question, they say, is whether quality control systems are in place to catch the inevitable mistakes that will come from comparing hundreds of millions of records, especially when the stakes are as high as questioning someone's citizenship.
There are some known data challenges with SAVE. For instance, there can be a lag time between when a person naturalizes and when that information is entered into the system, which can lead to the initial appearance that a person is a noncitizen on the voter rolls if they registered to vote immediately after naturalizing. SAVE materials also make clear there are some foreign-born citizens who cannot be verified by the system.
USCIS acknowledges these shortfalls and tells users that if the system returns an answer other than confirming citizenship, then it must also be manually reviewed by USCIS staff, and the elections office must contact the voter to give them a chance to provide proof of citizenship.
It's also unclear how reliable or complete the data coming from the Social Security Administration is, because as MIT election expert Charles Stewart notes, that data as well as the data within SAVE and on the voter rolls was collected independently and without this sort of integration in mind. A report from the Institute for Responsive Government noted recently that the SSA only began adding citizenship tags to records roughly 40 years ago, so the agency's data on natural-born citizens may be incomplete.
"The concern with any of these data-based matching procedures, is that people who don't know much about voter registration datasets just assume that the data are clean on [all] sides," said Stewart.
The most notable election data matching success story, a program called the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), took multiple years to develop and roll out. The system allows its more than two dozen member states to share government data across state lines, to eliminate dead voters from the rolls, find the few people in every federal election who illegally vote twice, and also register eligible voters when they move to a new place.
Nine Republican-led states have since pulled out of the organization due to viral falsehoods that spread on the far-right and general uneasiness about having a third party combing through state voter rolls. At least two of those states, Louisiana and Texas, are early piloters of this new data tool run by the federal government. The states have not disclosed many details and declined NPR's interview requests.
DHS says so far it has run more than 9 million voter records through the upgraded SAVE system, according to a person who attended a briefing about the new capabilities who was not authorized to speak to the media, and that early analysis found those records to contain 99.99% U.S. citizens. That analysis has not been independently verified, and it's not clear if any of the few noncitizens they did find ever actually voted.
"If this rolls out and it turns out that our voter rolls are pretty darn accurate … and it is shouted from the mountaintops and people believe it, then that would be big," said Tammy Patrick, an election expert at the nonprofit Election Center and former Arizona voting official. She noted however that there are large financial incentives, both for candidates and for grassroots election denial groups and influencers, to keep pushing misleading claims about noncitizen voting.
"My concern is that I'm not so sure that there will be those who will believe it, that there will be those who will stop raising donations and campaign funds on the narrative of fear-mongering and the illegitimacy of our systems," Patrick said.
Most states can't use the new SAVE capabilities yet because they don't collect full Social Security numbers as part of the voter registration process.
But the next SAVE upgrade will allow election officials to query with just the last four digits of a Social Security number, in addition to a full name and birthdate, according to two people who were on calls where such plans were discussed but asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plan. Such an expansion will make the citizenship searches available for all voting officials, although there is a wide range across the country when it comes to how much of a state's voter records have even partial Social Security numbers associated with them.
Future plans also include integrating state DMV data, according to the same sources, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is expected to reach out to every state's chief election official soon encouraging them to run their rolls through the system.
Some Republican election officials have been happy that DHS is taking their concerns about SAVE seriously. Idaho's Republican Secretary of State Phil McGrane used SAVE extensively ahead of the 2024 election, but found it difficult to use.
"This wasn't what the database was meant for and we were asking something of it that it really wasn't designed for," McGrane told NPR in early June. "Now there is attention being put to it to make it work that way."
However when NPR reached out more recently to ask about SAVE's new broader citizenship check capabilities, a spokesperson for McGrane's office, Chelsea Carattini, said the secretary had not been briefed or made aware of those changes by the federal government.
Who gets to know what's being built
While USCIS denied NPR's interview request about the changes and has sporadically shared updates with some state voting officials, a DHS staffer gave a full briefing about the tool to an influential group known for pushing false and misleading election fraud narratives.
On June 12, the Election Integrity Network, a grassroots group led by conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell who worked with President Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election, hosted a virtual event with David Jennings, who oversees the SAVE system. Democracy Docket first reported the briefing.
NPR also acquired audio of Mitchell seemingly speaking about Jennings at an earlier Election Integrity Network event in May. The nonprofit investigative group Documented, which often acquires audio of Mitchell's events, provided a recording to NPR.
"He is in charge of the SAVE database that has the citizenship data for, you know, everybody," Mitchell said at the May event. "And he is in the process of reconfiguring the entire [thing] so that we can actually determine who on the voter rolls is and is not a citizen."
Voting experts NPR spoke with expressed concern that the agency overseeing the creation of the voter data tool was sharing details with a group involved with denying the 2020 election results, but not the American public.
"Before the federal government just up and creates a massive data system that purports to be a record on all of us — that's a public conversation that we're owed," said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former Biden White House adviser on voting rights. "And not just as a public policy matter, as a moral matter, as a legal matter."
Under the Privacy Act of 1974, there is a formal process known as a system of records notice, for federal agencies to give public notice about new ways they intend to collect or use Americans' personal information. No such notice appears to have been published for the upgrade to SAVE that integrates Social Security data, and neither USCIS or SSA responded to an NPR inquiry asking if a new one had been issued.
Data Unknowns
The SAVE upgrade is part of a larger trend, led by DOGE, of the Trump administration taking unprecedented steps to amass and connect data across the federal government. The effort has sparked over a dozen lawsuits and cybersecurity concerns.
The public officials condemning the data consolidation have mostly been Democrats however, which is a departure from past privacy debates in American history.
"One thing that's rather striking about these moves around data in the present is that there has been so little outcry actually on the right, who have been sort of the standard bearers of worry about big government and data merging and data collection to begin with," said Sarah Igo, a history professor at Vanderbilt University.
One conservative voice who is expressing such concerns is Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of the nonprofit True the Vote, which has pushed numerous election conspiracy theories over the past decade.
Engelbrecht praised the SAVE effort in a recent newsletter, but expressed discomfort about the administration's efforts to centralize various federal databases and give access to the contractor Palantir.
"Such centralization of data poses a threat to individual freedoms and privacy," she wrote. "Surrendering our data to unchecked power isn't just a technical risk— it's a moral failure."
One of the biggest questions about the new SAVE is what happens to the voter data that states and counties upload to the system, particularly since it is now designed to verify entire state voter rolls.
USCIS specifies that it retains records of SAVE queries for 10 years. The agency did not respond to NPR's questions about whether it will keep copies of state voter rolls uploaded to SAVE, or whether it will use information states provide through the system as a basis for criminal or immigration investigations.
A state election official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the development told NPR they were specifically worried about how the administration would use information provided by states in immigration crackdown efforts. For that reason, the official, who has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations, said they expected there to be a clear partisan division in which states use it, even if all election officials have the same goal of accurate voter rolls.
"If I believed this database was accurate, and that I was going to get good usable information from it, you're damn right I would use it," the official said. "The question is, is the data usable? And [usable] in a way that I'm not going to jeopardize people who live in my jurisdiction?"
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