Living In Interesting Times

Trump is using taxpayer money to have the Census Bureau attempt to prove his 2020 election denialism claims. pic.twitter.com/AF0iU3W94g

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) August 18, 2026

I’m sure the data being used is absolutely reliable.

Christina Adkins, the state elections director, told county officials the state had reviewed Texas Department of Public Safety records confirming the citizenship of some of the 2,724 registered voters who were flagged as potential noncitizens, according to an audio recording of her comments obtained by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune, as well as election officials who heard them. The voters were flagged after the state checked its voter roll through a federal program called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify the citizenship of people registered to vote.

Absolutely. Reliable.

When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback.

Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate.

The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.

A similar situation has been playing out in Texas, where county clerks have likewise found numerous examples of misidentified voters across the state.

The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.

At Trump’s direction, DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. Many of the nation’s Republican secretaries of state have eagerly embraced the experiment, agreeing to upload all or part of their rolls.

But an examination of SAVE’s rollout by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reveals that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data and before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information.

As a result, SAVE has made persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing the status of people born outside the U.S., data gathered from local election administrators, interviews and emails obtained via public records requests show. Some of those people subsequently become U.S. citizens, a step that the system doesn’t always pick up.

Texas has 18,657,918 registered voters. 2,274 were incorrectly identified as noncitizens. Trump says out of 128,000,000 voters, 24,000 were identified as noncitizens. Which is actually a higher failure rate, who must be presumed because we can’t verify his numbers. 

And he thinks the Senate should just accept these numbers and pass the SAVE Act. In a functional government, this would be laughable. Right now we have to rely on the electoral calendar and the lack of interest in this law in the Senate. Where the question is whether it makes it to the floor, and not, will it be filleted in committee. As it should be.