Trump Administration Perfects Protection From Voting While American

The Trump administration announced a citizenship-verification system designed to protect Americans from the hazards of voting while American. In asking the Supreme Court to revive expanded use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, officials said the government must be free to combine Homeland Security files with Social Security data and sweep state voter rolls for citizens whose paperwork lacks the necessary patriotic formatting. The system replaces elections’ obsolete presumption that eligible voters remain eligible until evidence shows otherwise. Under the improved standard, citizenship is a clerical rumor that must be continuously disproved by the citizen claiming it.

Lower courts blocked the program after identifying privacy concerns and evidence that lawful citizens could be mislabeled as noncitizens. Administration officials cited those findings as proof that SAVE distributes suspicion fairly between imaginary illegal voters and actual registered Americans. “The safest voter is a voter who cannot vote, and with this beautiful database, we are making millions of Americans safer than ever before,” President Donald Trump said. “Nobody has ever protected voting by stopping so much voting before it can happen.” Citizens flagged because of misspellings, incomplete records or government errors may preserve their constitutional rights by presenting seventeen forms of identification, obtaining their childhood dentist’s citizenship records and securing a notarized Ohio birth certificate bearing matching signatures from the attending physician, county registrar and current secretary of state.

Solicitor General John Sauer has argued that SAVE merely provides information while states retain responsibility for removing voters, a division of labor allowing federal officials to claim credit for finding nonexistent noncitizens and local election workers to accept blame for purging real citizens. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the administration had unlawfully repurposed sensitive information belonging to millions of Americans, but officials appealed on the ground that privacy is the preferred hiding place of fraudulent voters, along with mailboxes, cities and registered Democrats. False matches, the administration explained, are not defects but civic reminders that citizenship expires whenever a database becomes suspicious, and any eligible voter removed by mistake has failed the basic test of remaining eligible without inconveniencing the government. The nation’s elections are now secure because American voters have been formally identified as the principal threat to them.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.