MILES PARKS, HOST:
In recent months, nearly 50 million Americans have had their names run through a federal data system that's now being used to try to weed out noncitizen voters. But as Republican states run their voter rolls through it, the system is also flagging Americans who do have the right to vote, like Anthony Nel, who lives near Dallas, Texas.
ANTHONY NEL: At first, I was confused because I have a passport. I've been voting for ten years. Why is this happening now? My first thought was, something is going on in terms of wanting to adjust and change who is registered to vote.
PARKS: Nel is one of 2,700 people the Texas secretary of state's office identified as, quote, "potential noncitizens" that are on Texas' voter rules. The state made this list by running every registered voter through the SAVE data system, which, for decades, was a federal lookup tool only used to check if immigrants were eligible for benefits. Earlier this summer, the Trump administration linked it to Social Security Administration data and now claims that SAVE is the first tool that can look up the citizenship of almost every American.
NPR reporter Jude Joffe-Block and I have been reporting on SAVE for months. And recently, Jude has been tracking how American citizens like Nel are being flagged.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: In Anthony Nel's case, you know, he goes to his mailbox. He gets a letter.
NEL: (Reading) As the voter registrar for Denton County, I am writing to notify you of important information regarding your voter registration.
JOFFE-BLOCK: It's asking him to prove his citizenship.
NEL: (Reading) We have received information from the Texas secretary of state reflecting that you might not be a United States citizen.
JOFFE-BLOCK: And he's been a really active voter up until this point, and so he's pretty shocked by this.
PARKS: It turns out that the SAVE system can't identify everyone who's been naturalized. These are Americans like Nel who gained citizenship as children when their parents became citizens.
JOFFE-BLOCK: So he was flagged and got this notice telling him if he wanted to stay on the voter rolls, he had to come and prove his citizenship by showing his passport.
PARKS: He was uncomfortable with sharing those sort of sensitive documents online, so he missed the deadline to prove his voter eligibility. He recently logged on to check his registration status.
NEL: I do not pop up. I am no longer registered to vote.
PARKS: Jude says this shouldn't be a surprise.
JOFFE-BLOCK: This has been a concern, that this program would lead to eligible citizens being removed from the voter rolls. It's also raising a lot of questions about how Americans' personal data is being used by the Trump administration.
PARKS: So for this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to ask Jude more about her reporting on the SAVE system. I started by asking her how Anthony Nel responded to finding out that he was no longer on his county voter rolls.
JOFFE-BLOCK: He was kind of surprised, disturbed, confused, frustrated. I think he was also surprised that it happened with just one letter of outreach. And - so under Texas code, you know, if somebody doesn't respond to this notice within 30 days, their registration is canceled.
NEL: They didn't say, your 30 days are up, you are no longer registered. There's no confirmation that someone received the letter. And so there are, you know, probably tons of people out there that have no idea that they're no longer registered to vote.
JOFFE-BLOCK: The Trump administration is encouraging states to use this SAVE system and run all their voters through it. But then there's some gray area about what happens next. It flags potential noncitizens, and then there's this extra step where the state is supposed to do additional verification, and what that looks like is a little unclear. So in Nel's case, it was getting a single letter in the mail that he had to respond to to stay on the rolls. You know, there's questions - what if people don't get that letter? Are people getting enough due process to be able to stay on the rolls?
PARKS: This is not the first time you've reported a story like this, about either somebody being removed from voter registration list or having been incorrectly tagged by the government in one of these efforts. What are those moments like, I guess, as you're talking to people and, in some cases, I think, even telling them for the first time that they have been picked up on one of these lists?
JOFFE-BLOCK: So I've done some reporting on voters in Virginia, Alabama and Tennessee, who were at different phases of getting a notice or had been removed from voter roles and didn't always know that that had happened. I contacted some voters who, I told them, you might want to look yourself up. And this is an interesting conversation to have with folks, where, you know, I'm asking, you know, are you a U.S. citizen? And they're showing me their passport over Zoom or FaceTime so that we can verify it.
And talking with them about what it feels like to get these notices and what they have to do about it - I mean, some of the folks in, you know, Virginia and in Alabama, in that reporting - they were born in the U.S., and those weren't necessarily SAVE-related, but they were mystified. How did I end up getting flagged for this? And that was a big question people had.
PARKS: I mean, is it also a process of building trust? I mean, I have to imagine if some random person just calls you and tells you, I mean, you're on a list, how do those interactions go? Or how do you go about the process of, you know, making it clear that you're legit or that you're not, you know, trying to get anybody in trouble? Or, like, I don't know. Like, do you ever think about even how to approach people in this situation more broadly?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Yeah, it's a - such a sensitive topic because you're basically talking to people about something where they don't know how their information has been used and, like - and might be very wary about these efforts and feel in some ways like their privacy is invaded, and maybe the last thing they want to do is talk to a stranger about that very thing - right? - and then show a sensitive document to that stranger over Zoom or FaceTime.
So these are really sensitive conversations. It involves building trust. Because I have reported on this now several times, you know, done a variety of stories about people who've been flagged in citizenship reviews for voter roles in various states, I'm able to send people those stories so they can kind of understand what we're working on and what our goals are with trying to tell their story.
PARKS: So for them to come up with this list of names of potential noncitizens - this is from the federal government giving this to the state - they used this SAVE system. This is a system that you and I have reported a lot on this year because the Trump administration has put a lot of resources and energy into overhauling it. But can you explain for people exactly what it is and what the Trump administration has changed?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Yeah, so it's been in use for, you know, over 40 years at this point. It's a federal data system that pings Department of Homeland Security and various immigration-related systems. And its original use was to be able to figure out if foreign-born people, if immigrants in the country were eligible for certain benefits.
Now, it went through a huge makeover in the last seven months. The Trump administration has really changed it because what they've done is they've linked it to Social Security Administration data. And they've made it so that it supposedly can look up anyone with a Social Security number and identify whether they are a U.S. citizen or not.
And so it's really essentially trying to be a citizenship lookup tool, which we've never had before and never had this kind of data consolidated. They've recently linked it to have U.S. passport information, as well as - and then the plan next is to add driver's license data to this, as well.
PARKS: So millions of people have been run through this system at this point. A number of states are using it now. Do we have any sense of what the results say or if this does provide any evidence for Trump's claims about noncitizen voting?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Yeah, well, this is really interesting because so far, the states that have run their entire voter rolls through SAVE and have made those results public - the number of suspected noncitizens who've cast ballots are really pretty low. So Louisiana, for example, ran almost 3 million voters through and identified 79 people that they think are noncitizens who cast ballots, going back to the 1980s. So this is a really tiny percentage of their registered voters. But I don't think that means that this narrative is going anywhere. I mean, we've seen just actually in the last week, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has been talking about this issue a lot.
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HARMEET DHILLON: I think it could be a six-figure number when you spread out over the whole country. It could be even higher than that.
JOFFE-BLOCK: She recently went on Newsmax and put out a number of what she guessed the number of noncitizens who voted in the U.S. is.
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DHILLON: And when you think about the margin in the 2020 election and some other elections nationally, a few hundred votes here or there could absolutely turn the outcome of a national election.
JOFFE-BLOCK: And that kind of brings up an issue, which is that when talking about this, there's numbers that get thrown out, and there could be potential noncitizens, which are different than confirmed noncitizens, and there could be noncitizens who are registered to vote, which is different than noncitizens who cast a ballot. So often, even talking about this issue can lead to a lot of confusion.
PARKS: That's NPR's Jude Joffe-Block. Thanks so much for talking with us, Jude.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Thank you, Miles. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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