MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For nearly 250 years, the United States has gone without a list of every one of its citizens. But in less than five months, the Trump administration has built a tool that aims to make one. It was designed in conjunction with the group Elon Musk organized, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. NPR is the first to report on the details of this new tool. One of the reporters on this story is Miles Parks, and he's here now to tell us more about it. Good morning, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Michel.
MARTIN: So what is the goal of this new system the administration's rolling out?
PARKS: It's designed to verify that only U.S. citizens are on voter rolls, and it's a major expansion of a tool that already existed within the Department of Homeland Security's immigration division. It's called SAVE. It's been around for decades, but it was initially designed only to check the status of noncitizens who are in the country legally so local governments could decide whether to offer them benefits. About a decade ago, election officials did start using it as well to verify if someone on the voter rolls who had records indicating they were a noncitizen had actually naturalized and become eligible to vote. But now, DHS has expanded this system so it can search for U.S. citizens, too, which really shocked privacy and election experts that we talked to.
MARTIN: OK, so back up just for a minute. I think some people might be surprised to find out that there is not a system up until now to check if somebody is a U.S. citizen. So could you just talk about that?
PARKS: I mean, there has just been a really long history of people on the left - and then I will say, especially on the right - of people not trusting the federal government with this kind of sensitive data in a centralized place. But what seems to be taking priority here is President Trump's concern about noncitizen voting, which, to be clear, has never been shown to be a widespread problem in American elections. Every study or effort to uncover it has found that it happens only in tiny microscopic numbers. And voting officials have said that verifying citizenship in cases where it's unclear is laborious work, and they wish there were better systems in place to help. But the fact that this new citizenship verification tool seems driven by misinformation may just cause more problems.
MARTIN: How exactly is the system supposed to work?
PARKS: So basically, SAVE is a tool that's able to ping a bunch of different immigration databases to get an answer on citizenship status, traditionally for legal noncitizens. Now, thanks to DOGE, the system can also ping data at the Social Security Administration, which keeps point-in-time information on U.S. citizens when they get a number. So when you combine those two capabilities, essentially, what DHS says is that they should be able to check the citizenship status of almost any American in the country legally because almost every American now has a number.
MARTIN: So you've explained why there hasn't been this database before. But given that there has never been a database of U.S. citizens before, is this controversial?
PARKS: I mean, there is an open question as to whether this is legal, Michel. There are federal laws that govern how new data systems with the personal information of Americans can be created, and legal experts we talked to seem to doubt that those processes were followed in this instance. Another big unknown is whether the system even works. I mean, obviously, accuracy is a big deal when you talk about questioning someone's citizenship. And a person who attended a DHS briefing on the system told us the agency has run more than 9 million voter records through the system already, but none of that analysis has been made public so far. Here's Kim Wyman, who's the former Republican secretary of state of Washington.
KIM WYMAN: It seems like it takes the federal government more than just four months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that's going to be accurate.
PARKS: And then, lastly, it's just unclear what DHS is doing with all of this voter data once it has it. I talked to one voting official who said they would be interested in using the tool if it was found to be accurate, but they didn't expect their state to try it because they were worried about what else the federal government might do with that election data. We asked the immigration arm of DHS about all of these questions, but we weren't given any responses.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Miles Parks. Miles, thank you.
PARKS: Thank you.
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