Elected officials, state agencies, privacy experts, state and national organizations representing millions of Americans and thousands of individuals across the country just sent a clear message to the Trump-Vance administration: stop abusing our personal data.

In October, the League of Women Voters and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful expansion of DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system into a new tool for conducting citizenship checks to determine eligibility to vote and obtain government benefits. Because the new system combines and repurposes millions of Americans’ data in ways that were never intended, the changes create serious privacy and data security risks and could lead to U.S. citizens being wrongfully purged from state voter rolls or wrongfully denied government benefits.

The coalition is represented by counsel from CREW, Democracy Forward, and Fair Elections Center.

In response to the lawsuit, DHS belatedly published a System of Records Notice for the expanded SAVE system – which triggered a public comment period required under the Privacy Act – seeking input on these changes. 

The agency received over 9,300 comments before the December 1 deadline, and nearly 98% were opposed to the government’s dramatic expansion of the SAVE system.

In addition to the thousands of individual comments from people across the country, opposition to the government’s plan came from organizations including League of Women Voters, Texas Civil Rights Project, Demos, Vote Riders, All Voting is Local, Center for Democracy and Technology, Clean Elections Texas, Common Cause, APIAVote, Protect Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice, LULAC, AALDEF, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NAACP LDF, Chinese Progressive Association, National Urban League, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, National Women’s Law Center, UnidosUS, Service Employees International Union, Movement Advancement Project, National Network for Arab American Communities, Law Forward, Fair Elections Center, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Campaign Legal Center, Southern Poverty Law Center, End Citizens United, The Arc of Northern Virginia, Common Cause Wisconsin, Issue One, American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, American Civil Liberties Union, American Oversight, Center for American Progress, and the Data Foundation.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center led a comment signed by the American Immigration Council, Association of Public Data Users, Center for Democracy & Technology, Defending Rights & Dissent, Demand Progress Education Fund, Free Speech for People, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Government Information Watch, Japanese American Citizen League, National Hispanic Media Coalition, National Women’s Law Center, Project on Government Oversight, Restore the Fourth, Secure Elections Network, and Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

A group of 18 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Tish James and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, submitted a comment in opposition. A dozen Secretaries of State also oppose the changes. U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate committee that oversees elections, wrote in opposition too. Ten House members, led by Rep. Nikema Williams, also submitted comments. State and local agencies spoke out against the administration’s plans–including the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, the California Department of Social Services, and election officials in Travis County, TX, who have seen firsthand how the SAVE system has wrongly identified eligible Texas voters as potential non-citizens and dealt with the fallout.

The thousands of comments rightfully point out that the changes not only violate the law, but place Americans’ privacy, security, and voting rights in peril. Below are some highlights.

State Attorneys General:

“The Administration’s expansion of SAVE uses the information of U.S.-born citizens who have never interacted with our immigration system and who never consented to the use of their personal data in SAVE. Alongside Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) well documented efforts to acquire massive troves of personal data from a variety of sources, this project is ill-advised and a massive privacy overreach. It exposes millions of individuals to possible data breaches, pools vast swaths of sensitive and otherwise-segregated data, and furthers the Administration’s efforts to create a national surveillance database for use in immigration enforcement, voter list maintenance, and other purposes. Moreover, because there is evidence that DHS implemented the SAVE program modifications months ago, this SORN clearly reflects a belated effort to legitimize the federal government’s unlawful modifications to those systems.”

Secretaries of State: 

“While DHS claims that its changes to SAVE make it an effective tool for voter eligibility verification, the modifications to SAVE are likely to degrade, not enhance, State efforts to ensure free, fair, and secure elections. The expanded version of SAVE will introduce unnecessary and unwarranted reliability, privacy, and security issues into the sensitive voter information data we are entrusted to protect. It is likely to misidentify eligible voters as non-citizens and to chill participation by eligible voters. It has not been proven an accurate or reliable source of data for voter verification purposes, and there is significant cause for concern on this score. What the modified system will do, however, is allow the federal government to capture sensitive data on hundreds of millions of voters nationwide and distribute that information as it sees fit. It will facilitate the federal administration’s attempt to claim for itself states’ authority to regulate and administer elections. And it threatens to expose hundreds of millions of Americans’ private data to cyberattack and misuse.”

Travis County, TX officials:

“We need only look at these latest efforts to flag non-citizens in Texas to understand that the data provided by SAVE is, at minimum, out of date. There are strong indicators that almost 70% of the individuals flagged in the SAVE list previously provided proof of citizenship to [state officials]. That error rate is wholly unacceptable when the impact is possible exclusion from the voter rolls. Travis County Officials ask DHS to withdraw the SORN given that the proposed expansion of the SAVE system exceeds legal authority and does not properly account for the risks posed to voters through the proposed use of the system.”

Civil Rights and Advocacy Organizations

MALDEF: “The modified SAVE System is precisely the kind of ‘formal or de facto national data bank[], or centralized Federal information System[]’ that Congress sought to prevent with the Privacy Act,” and will “disproportionate[ly] harm the Latino community.”

NAACP Legal Defense Fund: “The SAVE expansion introduces serious risks to voter rights, privacy, due process, and civil liberties. The system relies on incomplete and inaccurate data sources. It encourages states to take actions that may wrongfully cancel the registrations of eligible voters and places Black voters and naturalized citizens at particular risk of disenfranchisement. This system undermines the privacy protections that Congress established to prevent the creation of centralized government dossiers, and it occurred without adequate public notice and raises substantial concerns under federal law.”

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund: “These changes threaten to disenfranchise lawfully registered voters without justification and will have a disparate impact on Asian American voters. DHS has demonstrated no basis for this change as extensive research has shown that widespread voter fraud, including non-citizen voting, is extremely rare. At its core, this overhaul to SAVE is part of a larger misinformation campaign to sow distrust in immigrants and communities of color as well as undermine the public’s faith in elections in the United States at all levels.”

Campaign Legal Center: “SAVE cannot fulfill the citizenship verification for voting service it purports to provide. The USCIS, Social Security Administration (“SSA”), driver’s license, and passport data on which SAVE relies, particularly during its initial citizenship check, contain significant gaps and inaccuracies. Those inaccuracies could result in the disenfranchisement of eligible voters. … DHS has not demonstrated that it has implemented robust safeguards to ensure the data maintained for use by the SAVE system is secure and protects the privacy of American citizens before SAVE is used for voter verification. … Finally, the federal government’s aggressive and unprecedented use of SAVE for voter verification exceeds the Executive Branch’s constitutional authority with respect to elections.”

ACLU: “The proposal would expand the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program (SAVE) to include U.S. citizens, breaking from forty years of practice. SAVE would integrate Social Security numbers, passport numbers, and state motor vehicle records and voter files, establishing a centralized federal database of U.S. citizens. This expansion of SAVE is unprecedented, dangerous, without statutory authorization, and in violation of the Privacy Act and more. We strongly urge the Department to withdraw the proposal and roll back any changes already made to SAVE.”

Former Federal Privacy Officials

Maya Bernstein: “The enormous expansion of data sharing represented by this notice is exactly the sort of thing that the Congress attempted to prevent when it passed the Privacy Act of 1974. Leading up to the Act’s passage, Congress was concerned about the creation of huge, comprehensive databanks of individuals. The legislative history of the Privacy Act makes clear that the Congress wanted to prevent the creation of ‘formal or de facto national databanks, ‘centralized Federal information systems,’ and ‘interagency computer data banks,’ so that it would be ‘legally impossible for the Federal Government in the future to put together anything resembling a ‘1984’ personal dossier on a citizen.’”

Individual Comments

“The SAVE program’s overhaul was implemented without proper public notice or adherence to the Administrative Procedure Act. DHS must immediately halt this expansion, restore the program to its original purpose, and conduct a transparent rulemaking process that allows for meaningful public input. Americans’ personal information should not be weaponized against them. DHS must protect our privacy, uphold the rule of law, and safeguard every citizen’s right to vote.” (Link)

“DHS has no right to repurpose our private data without our consent. These changes will only hurt voters, election systems, Social Security information, and further weaken trust in the United States government and its institutions. I urge the safety, security, and privacy of our Social Security information be protected and kept separate and apart from the DHS completely. Do not link or merge these databases. (Link)

The Social Security Administration also published a system of records notice on the SAVE program, with a deadline of December 12th. More than 10,000 comments have been submitted already—you can add yours here.

Read More in Reports