Donald Trump’s obsession with ensuring that only citizens vote in elections, in spite of overwhelming evidence This electoral fraud is extremely rare, reaches its logical conclusion. According to NPR report, the Trump administration is in the process of building a searchable national citizen data system, the first in its kind in the country, with few guards for how it is used.
According to the report, the database is a collaborative effort between the Department of Home Security and Department of Government Performance, and will be supported by the US Citizenship and Immigration Service of the DHS. The agencies have worked to link federal databases to create a system that state and county election officials can be used to seek the civic status of anyone on their voting lists. The database, which will reportedly contain information about both US-born and naturalized citizens, will use data drawn from the social security administration databases and immigration. Remember that a whole show Doge had over its effort to suck SSA data? That makes me feel very important now.
There are many shocking issues about the development of this national database. Main among them is the fact that its development has occurred mainly behind the curtains. Most Americans probably have little doubt that their data is collected by the government, but would also probably prefer to know what is done with it. After all, about Two -thirds of Americans Believe the risk of the government to collect data exceeds the benefits. Now their data is included in a database, which they do not know and have no clear restrictions on how it can be used. Surely that won’t make anyone’s concerns make it easier.
US has historically have rejected the idea from maintaining a centralized database of the information of its citizens. Although there is a lot of data collection, from the IRS to the census, this gives us an idea of how many people are in the country and who they are, has never been used to create a national number that tells officials every human being in the country, biographical information about them, and where they live.
The database will obviously be available to election officials so that they can confirm the citizenship of voters on their lists, which is again a matter that simply does not happen. The Conservative Heritage Foundation has a database of “tested” cases of voting fraud, which dates from the 1980s, and there are 68 cases by non-citizens reportedly voting. But without any obvious protections in place, it is possible that the database could be misused by bad actors.
There are also true doubts that the data will be reliable, as none of it has been collected for this purpose. Even the SSA data often lacks citizen tags, According to the Institute for Responsive Government. Surely nothing bad will come from a nationwide database with incomplete information and there will be no false allegations of voting fraud for it, right?
