The ‘Frankenstein’ Database Powering the Hunt for Noncitizen Voters

Election officials using the federal SAVE database to verify voter rolls have encountered problems. Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. A database the Trump administration put at the center of its hunt for noncitizen voters got a second life last month when the Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s ruling that barred the administration and election officials from using the tool to look for noncitizens on their voter rolls. After the Department of Homeland Security’s rollout of the overhauled Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database last year, more than 20 states were eager adopters, uploading their voter rolls into the database and generating lists of potential noncitizens for investigation. Mark Sawyer is a reporter for The Dispatch based in Washington, D.C., and the inaugural Journalism Excellence Fellow through The Fund for American Studies. He previously worked as an investigator and open-source intelligence analyst focused on a range of issues including election integrity, national security, and Russia's use of disinformation and the internet to pursue its foreign policy goals. His favorite professional experiences have been serving as an election observer in Ukraine and Moldova. When Mark is not going down rabbit holes for his latest article, you can probably find him experimenting in the kitchen, birdwatching in the city, or convincing his unsuspecting friends to play a complicated board game. More We Think You’d Like