DHS lookup tool may expose sensitive data of hundreds of millions of Americans, secretaries of state warn

A repurposed IT system being used by the Department of Homeland Security presents “unacceptable risks” to the nation’s eligible voters, according to a group of secretaries of state who on Monday signed off on a letter opposing a recent proposal by the federal agency.

The remarks, which include the signatures of a dozen secretaries of state, mostly from states run by Democrats, are a 29-page protest against a disclosure by DHS that it plans to codify its repurposing of a system originally designed to check immigration statuses and verify benefits eligibility. The arcane and purportedly unwieldy system, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program, is subject to numerous legal changes under DHS’s proposal, including that it would be used not for its original narrow purpose, but allow bulk searches and searches of “individuals that are U.S. citizens by birth” to find ineligible voters and instances of voter fraud.

DHS is also proposing to update the records schema inside SAVE, which its proposal notes “is not a database,” but a mechanism for fetching data from other federal systems. These changes include using “driver’s license and state identification card numbers to check and confirm identity information” and integrating full Social Security numbers.

The secretaries of state claim in their letter that the modified system will allow the federal government to claim additional authority for administering elections, an authority the Constitution grants the states, and expose “hundreds of millions of Americans’ private data to cyberattack and misuse.”

DHS’s repurposing of SAVE can be traced to recent unfounded claims by some Republicans that noncitizen voting is rife in the United States, and that a technological solution is needed to root it out. A group of Republican secretaries of state last February wrote Kristi Norm, the DHS secretary, asking for upgrades to SAVE, including bulk searches and allowing searches to be performed using common information like names and dates of birth.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who signed Monday’s letter, conceded DHS’s claim that SAVE is not a database.

“It’s certainly a way to create a database,” Simon said. “It’s a tool that purports to identify ineligible voters who might be on voter rolls in the various states. They’re proposing that for a 10-year period, at least, they will be able to scoop up personal and sensitive data on perhaps as many as 200 million people for uses they won’t describe, shared with agencies they won’t name.”

The DHS proposal notes the central role that driver’s licenses play in verifying identity in the United States, and that SAVE will rely on state driver’s licensing agencies or the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, or NLETS, an international and nationwide information-sharing hub that’s not run by the government, to validate other information and “gain access to other government enumerators.”

“This will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies,” the DHS proposal reads. “It must be noted that the Driver’s license number search functionality is not live at the time of publication but will be in the foreseeable future.”

The Democratic secretaries of state say the use of NLETS is “particularly concerning” because it is a private entity, one that, by its own accounting, provides 100 data sources to 1 million users across 45,000 law enforcement agencies.

“Under such an arrangement,” the Democratic secretaries of state wrote, “the personally identifying information of registered voters who have perhaps never had any interaction with any arm of law enforcement could have their data integrated with numerous law enforcement databases that contain everything from vehicle registrations to biometric data.”

Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel at the Fair Elections Center, said she’s concerned that the federal government using an untested system, which was not designed for bulk searches or for verifying voting eligibility, will lead to eligible voters being told they’re ineligible.

“They should know within the federal government that Social Security data is not reliable as ongoing citizenship data,” Kanter Cohen said. “It’s a static snapshot of someone’s citizenship when they first interact with the Social Security Administration.”

That Republicans might turn to SAVE for evidence, however poorly attested, to support claims of noncitizen voting is possible given recent events. As early as 2022, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger pointed said his office’s queries of the SAVE system yielded 1,634 cases in which noncitizens attempted to vote, but were blocked by the state’s safeguards.

“As liberal states and cities around the country are changing their laws to allow noncitizen voting, I will continue to take steps to ensure Georgia’s elections are executed with integrity,” Raffensperger said in a press statement at the time.

The evidence for actual noncitizen voting, beyond extremely rare cases, does not exist. Numerous studies, including repeated reviews by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, have found that noncitizen voting almost never happens. Simon, Minnesota’s secretary of state, prefers to call the phenomenon “microscopic,” because it does technically exist. In his own state, a 2024 study by a University of St. Thomas law professor found that over the course of a decade of elections, in which 13.4 million ballots were cast, only three instances of unlawful noncitizen voting or voter registration were found.

What DHS officials have in mind beyond their recent proposal is unclear. The department did not respond to a letter sent by a group of secretaries of state last month, who cited “immense concern” with how their voter data would be used and shared across the federal government. The office of Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Tuesday issued a press release announcing that DHS had not responded to their concerns by the provided Monday deadline, and called the requests for voter data by President Donald Trump’s administration “unprecedented.” 

“Americans deserve to know that when they register to vote, the Trump administration will not misuse their information,” Griswold said in the release.

But why would federal officials modify an old data-lookup tool to perform functions it was never designed to perform, without public testing, all to stop a group of people from voting who already aren’t voting? Kanter Cohen, of the Fair Elections Center, said she wasn’t sure.

“I think at best they are not looking at the evidence,” she said. “At worst, they’re aware of it and doing it anyway.”