President Trump’s efforts to ‘SAVE’ voting focus on a nonexistent issue
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On Sept. 25, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3, the exact ideological split within the judicial branch, that the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database will be accessible to states before midterm elections.
The SAVE database is a tool used to determine someone’s immigration status and citizenship data. It also decides whether they qualify for public services and benefits, such as Medicaid and food stamps.
President Donald Trump argues the SAVE database should be expanded as a safeguard to protect our elections from fraud — something he’s made a rallying cry since his first presidential campaign.
The absurdity of this assertion ignores what makes our elections safe. The purposeful complexity and fragmentation of elections and our general federal system are the main safeguards we possess against election fraud.
The large amount of state and local checks on voting integrity make voter impersonation or double-voting difficult. It sets us apart from other countries with regard to how we administer our voting procedures.
Giving our federal government too much power over state voting data is a breach of our civil rights and right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment. It’s why acts like the Privacy Act were passed.
But even if we give Trump the benefit of the doubt with his claims of blatant and rampant voter fraud in American elections, they’d still fall short of those exaggerated assertions.
For starters, its existence is minuscule. A 2021 study by the Associated Press reported that within the six battleground states during the 2020 presidential election, fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud were found.
In essence, Donald Trump is attempting to solve an issue that doesn’t exist.Kaelen Kinsella, Columnist
In fact, the exact percentage of voter fraud incidents across more than a decade of elections is between 0.0003% and 0.0025%.
Nonetheless, to look at voter fraud through Trump’s lens, we’d have to blissfully ignore the most common explanations for its occurrence: clerical errors and bad data matching practices. These issues will only be amplified with the expansions of the SAVE database.
These datasets include the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Automated Targeting System, which relies on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist. This watchlist, however, often mistakes identities and commits acts of bias against certain religious, racial and ethnic minorities.
These aren’t preventative worries. The SAVE database is also plagued with issues. A multitude of cases regarding fraudulent flagging have occurred in different states across the last few decades.
In one instance, Texas used the database to check over a voter database of 18 million residents, revealing around 2,700 potential noncitizen voters. But 578 cases of false flagging occurred — excluding 117 that are still being investigated — and disenfranchised completely valid voters.
And we must not forget the actions regarding breaches of voting procedure made by the man leading this charge. Trump has been caught on tape pressuring Georgia officials to find him 11,780 votes, coincidentally a single vote more than the margin of victory Joe Biden had in the state.
Trump is attempting to solve an issue that doesn’t exist. He’s only adding more guardrails that will deter voters from being civically engaged in the political system, a problem that’s already prevalent in the U.S. In the 2024 presidential election, almost one-third of our voting population stayed home.
It’s our civic duty to ensure we let our representatives in the Senate and House of Representatives understand the countless flaws this will create in an already secure system.
Kaelen Kinsella is a freshman majoring in journalism and political science. He can be reached at kaelenkinsella@gmail.com.
