SAVE voting
Remember the SAVE act, that would have required voter verification likely to disenfranchise anyone whose birth certificate didn’t match their current ID? (Like a lot of married women, for example…)
It didn’t die. It was reborn as a regulatory database that—coincidentally—also bears the acronym SAVE. After losing a lawsuit, DHS was forced to briefly open a public comment period…so drop them your thoughts!
How to do it:
SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) is a federal database run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that all levels of government agencies use to verify the citizenship of people applying for benefits or licenses. It tracks whether someone is eligible for a work permit, for example. The data is traditionally buggy and incomplete and the burden is on immigrants.
Now the GOP wants to expand the data collection and sharing and use the database to cross-check voting records. The data is entirely unsuited to the task, even if widespread voter purges weren’t problematic. This is an effort to disenfranchise voters, and particularly voters most likely to be mis-identified as immigrants in the database. Read more about the issue here.
Comments are due by Monday December 1st.
Sample Comment: Many of the sources of information that SAVE draws from, including the Social Security Administration’s database, have proven to be unreliable in the past, so using them as a major part of the basis for removing someone from the voter rolls will end up disenfranchising eligible voters across the country. More Samples
