Don’t “Think” Like Trump

 The irony of “flooding the zone with bullshit” is that it’s effective only because so many people think it must not be bullshit. And not all those people are true believers in who’s shipping the bull.

Case in point: SAVE. No, not the SAVE Act that’s passed the House. Systematically Alien Verification for Entitlements, a “tool” (like a broken fingernail is a screwdriver) DHS uses which Trump ordered be available to states to determine eligibility if voters. A way to check their citizenship status.  Except it’s useless, because once again: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

In Texas, news reports began emerging about voters being mistakenly flagged as noncitizens soon after state officials announced the results of running the state’s voter roll through SAVE in October.

Our reporting showed these errors were more widespread than previously known, involving at least 87 voters across 29 counties. County election administrators suspect there may be more. Confusion took hold when the Texas secretary of state’s office sent counties lists of flagged voters and directed clerks to start demanding proof of citizenship and to remove people from the rolls if they didn’t respond.

“I really find no merit in any of this,” said Bobby Gonzalez, the elections administrator in Duval County in South Texas, where SAVE flagged three voters, all of whom turned out to be citizens.

Even counting people flagged in error, the first bulk searches using SAVE haven’t validated the president’s claims that voting by noncitizens is widespread. At least seven states with a total of about 35 million registered voters have publicly reported the results of running their voter rolls through the system. Those searches have identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01% of registered voters — as noncitizens. This aligns with previous findings that noncitizens rarely register to vote.

The devil is in the details, and as usual, Pro Publica provides them. (It’s worth noting the Texas Secretary of State disavowed any responsibility for SAVE data being crap, claiming they are not “an investigative agency.” But it also has no power to override county level decisions.) The tl;dr is:

Only 27 states have tried to use SAVE to purge voter rolls 

Texas and Missouri, the two states reported on in the article, have found more errors in the data than accuracy 

The Sinister Six and Trump may believe in a “unitary executive,” but power in America does not extend from the crown downwards, it truly rises from the bottom, up. Voter registration in Missouri and Texas, at least, is a matter handled at the county level. And in both states, the data provided by SAVE is not being embraced wholeheartedly and gleefully by the officials responsible. More often than not, they recognize crap when they see it. Trump wants them to purge voters who don’t show up in SAVE as citizens if they don’t present proof of citizenship within 14 days of notification. Almost no county official is doing that. And Trump can’t force them to. 

He can’t, in other words, take over federal elections with an executive order. 

The article is worth reading for the details (including that SAVE now includes confidential SSA data (thanks, DOGE!), which is one reason it’s supposed to be used for a purpose it was never designed for.). But it also illustrates government in America is a great deal more complex, with a great many more people beyond MAGA’s reach, than news or the internet might tell you. So when Trump says he’s going to take over elections, or Noem says they’re going to make sure the “right people” vote, they are just spitting into a hurricane. They don’t have the power. We, the people, do.

It’s past time we recognized that.