- SAVE was a database established in 1986 to determine if immigrants were eligible for federal benefits
- Starting in 2005, some states used it to check their voter registrations
- By executive order, the administration merged it with the SSN database to make bulk searches easier
- Organizations sued, and a lower court said the administration had to hold off on rolling out the changes while the lawsuit was pending. The Supreme Court overruled the stay, saying the lawsuit had not proved enough merit to stop the policy while the lawsuits proceed.
- It is still up to states whether they use SAVE or not. If someone shows up in the SAVE database, the state may ask them to provide proof of citizenship.
The concern here from the dissent is that states are going to purge their voter registrations while awaiting the ruling. But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits.
> But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits
Except we've seen this before. States purge roles, judge orders them to restore it, oopsie we can't do that before an election, judge permits it to continue until after the election. We've seen this with voter roll purges, gerrymandering, etc. Surprisingly it only seems like one party does this, the party that supposedly supports democracy.
Yea but those mass lawsuits won't happen or matter until after midterms at this point, so even if they did illegal stuff in the end the votes will have been suppressed successfully. In a war, if you do a war crime, the dead are still dead even if the person who committed the war crime is accountable later. In politics, if they do a criminal act like this, they win an election and never have to account for their actions, because their side won and won't call them to account.
Yeah its part corruption and the weaponized taboo of second guessing election results.
I'm convinced that even if there were large scale concerns about the legitimacy elections in the USA, they would quitely be puy to rest because God forbid we ever reckon with the fact yhat the USA might not be a perfect democracy, cant taint the image.
Anyone looking to tamper with elections now knows they can just equivalate anyone who challenges them with Jan 6ers types.
Tbf, democracy in this country is fundamentally broken when you have 4 companies that control the media and have a ton of control over how people see the world.
As I understand it, one of the main disenfranchisement tactics is to challenge ballots already cast. It's potentially very effective because the voter must see that their vote was challenged and then proactively contest it.
Based on this NPR article, there are only about 28k voters nationwide on the "potentially fraudulent" list. And when Texas tried pursing theirs, they only ended up being able to act on ~100 of them.
Realistically, the rate of fraud nationwide is actually really low and this database would just a waste of time for the states that pursue it. But by holding it off the courts would be doing more to cover the administration (by giving them a plausible excuse) than letting it proceed.
It reminds me of those police drug busts where they take a picture of all the drugs and it's just like a couple small bags, but they'll run the press release like "hundreds of lives saved!"
Acting like there are going to be millions of voters purged serves both party messages right now.
I'd say it serves multiple purposes. Optics is certainly one of them "look upon my works, ye Republican...".
But I think another perspective is a more dangerous effort to chip away at state responsibility for the process and procedures of voting. Once this is owned or easily influenced by a national institution then a single-party state disguised as a republic becomes far simpler to implement.
The danger here being that our system has relied on decentralized states handling these tasks and thus has not created the guardrails necessary (if ever they could survive a unitary executive theory) to ensure fairness.
Challenging cast ballots is non-scalable because it requires a lot of formal judicial process separately for each ballot challenged. Realistically a State could go after less than a thousand.
Even if you know with high certainty that a million ballots are fraudulent it is effectively impossible to challenge them because the judicial capacity required to do so doesn't remotely exist. There are adversarial scenarios where someone dumps vast numbers of fraudulent ballots and those ballots cannot be contested.
State legislatures have historically been empowered to vote in place of the people if the vote becomes infeasible or unreliable. People voting in Federal elections is largely a 20th century invention; the old methods are still available.
Every "concern" raised by the Trump administration is cover for voter disenfranchisement. Period.
Voter fraud is incredibly rare, but I have a gut feeling that electoral fraud has happened and will continue to get worse, courtesy of the same administration.
It must be remembered that every accusation from them is a confession.
For the acolytes that down vote me, at least make your case on where and why I am wrong. My comment is as a citizen, not as a partisan.
So what's the allowed level of voter fraud we should accept? And the fact check is about votes not registered voters. Funny how it focuses on national elections when local elections can be swayed by handfuls of votes.
What level of suppression of legitimate voters are we willing to accept in order to avoid voter fraud?
See, there are always two kinds of errors. In the case of voting, one kind is where you let someone vote who shouldn't, and the other is where you don't let someone vote who should. And when you try to decrease one, you increase the other, because you don't have a perfect system.
So, how much suppression of legitimate voters should we accept in order to decrease voter fraud? I think the answer should be "no more voters should be suppressed than there are fraudulent votes cast, and preferably fewer".
Well, how many fraudulent votes are cast? There is little evidence that it's a large problem. In the absence of such evidence, I do not thing that there should be large changes to try to eliminate the fraudulent votes that exist, because they are likely to cause more problems the other direction.
Note well: I do not approve of fraudulent votes. But even more I disapprove of creating a large problem to fix a small one.
> Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.
The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database
> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
>> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
>It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
How's the database used? From what I can tell it's a database of non-citizens that claimed benefits, so using it as a blacklist against voter rolls seems... fine? Even if the original premise of "there's hoards illegal immigrants voting" is questionable.
> It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote. So even if they use SAVE to "flag" potential voters, they are still going to have to provide people a way to provide proof of citizenship.
But certain groups are probably more likely than others to need to worry about having to prove their citizenship. You don't need to make it impossible for people to vote, you just need to create enough friction that some of them won't who otherwise would.
>Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote.
Yes they can. States can deny citizens the right to vote for "participation in rebellion, or other crime", as per the 14th Amendment and felons are often denied the right to vote. They can't do so on the basis of "race, color or former servitude" (15th Amendment) and probably not any other protected class reason (sex, religion, ethnicity) but that implicitly gives states the right to do so for any other reason.
Wow I haven’t heard of the SAVE database at all before today, despite knowing about e-verify and SEVIS and similar programs. Reading Wikipedia there’s also VIS and PCQS, two more systems I haven’t heard of. It seems that the country’s distaste for a national ID not only forces each state to issue IDs but also the federal government to create a patchwork of slightly different ID programs.
The main issue is not distaste per se, though there are bi-partisan factions that oppose a national ID.
The Supreme Court has consistently asserted that a mandatory Federal ID is unconstitutional because that is a power reserved for the individual States. It is the same reason everyone has a Social Security card but they are explicitly not to be used as an ID. Every time Congress has tried to constructively invent a loophole to work around this prohibition the Supreme Court disallowed it.
The US government can issue IDs. Many people have multiple Federal IDs. The US government just can't make everyone have one or use them. It is what it is.
As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
Serious attempts to analyze the budget with the goal of addressing over-spending generally omit Social Security, because it's paid for with a dedicated tax. Repealing Social Security entirely wouldn't do much to address the budget deficit, certainly nowhere near as much as naive "look at how bit that part of this pie graph is!" analyses suggest it would.
Because the social security surplus was used to fund the treasury instead of being put towards social security. The 1990s budget surplus that became the Bush tax cuts? Yeah that was the money that was supposed to pay for social security.
Surprising. Is that something common in Econ literature or something? It's definitely not the norm in poli sci journals, unless something's changed in the decade or so since I looked at many of those, since it just crowds out and distorts things that do contribute to the deficit.
It does hold government debt, but that's not really useful and puts it in a totally different category from "spending that contributes to the budget deficit".
Since 2001 the US has spent 29.7 Trillion on entitlements excluding social security vs 18 Trillion of military spending.
Of course the entitlements are useful spending - these are things people need and benefit from. Had these dollars not been spent by the US government, they would have been spent directly by the taxpayers for the same goods and services. While some money may have been saved if this spending were private, it probably wouldn't change the total economic impact by much.
On the other hand we have nothing to show for the $18 trillion burned on wars that went horrifically. If we'd put that money into useful investments such that it paid interest and stopped our defense spending, we would be running a $300 billion per year surplus right now with no cuts to any other government services, to say nothing of the potential economic advantages if the wars had just never happened.
And don't get me started on the $10 trillion lost to the Bush tax cuts and their extensions.
> 29.7 Trillion on entitlements excluding social security
Convenient to exclude SS for ... no reason other than it makes your numbers look better because its a vast majority of entitlement spending so it makes your argument look bad.
May I ask you provide numbers including all entitlement spending, which includes SS?
This is what I meant by knowing what the numbers are.
The purpose of my response was that using Friedman's quote was hypocritical when expensive wars are fought and taxes on the wealthy are cut (a point ignored). It's also unclear to what extend the undocumented are a burden on the welfare state in relation to the above. The current party in power, with the exception of Senator Rand Paul, seem remarkably unconcerned with the $40 trillion deficit.
In my life I have known dozens (maybe hundreds?) of so-called illegal aliens. They all tell the same story: they came to the US to earn money to support their families. I have NEVER heard someone tell me they came to the US to vote, or they intend to vote, or they even know what voting is. So, this idea that millions of illegals are voting just doesn't align with my reality, and honestly, I don't think it aligns with any reality.
The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.
Undocumented is the much broader term which doesn't carry the negative connotation that somebody living here is an "alien". They may have come here illegally, or their status may be in limbo, they could be a refugee seeking asylum, they could have overstayed their visa, they could be waiting on a ruling from an immigration court, or waiting to appear in court.
The administration could have decided to revoke their status. A judge could have put a stay in place because deportation would mean returning them to a dangerous situation. See the Abrego Garcia case. Some don't even know their status since their parents brought them here at a young age.
So you see it's not as simple as branding everyone an "illegal alien". That's political propaganda at work.
The money is being spent because Trump cannot admit that he lost at something. He knows his approval is extremely low, so he prefers chaos and say “they cheated, I didn’t lose”
It's not a real issue but it has the base riled up. A MAGA acquaintance told me he was a "single issue voter" based on that fear. I think he phrased it that way to sound principled but the very aspect of being a "single issue voter" shows a lack of understanding of the full impact of that vote.
What the Right has done is take the fact that there are some communities (in liberal areas) that have allowed non-citizens to vote in community issues, which is not entirely unreasonable. They then mash up that "fact" and trumpet it as an attack on our system by "illegals".
My prediction is that republican-led states are going to implement this for voting and throw their state elections into chaos, while states that don't implement do just fine.
The DHS SAVE which is the same backend data source used by CMS HUB Verify Lawful Presense (VLP) has been used by State systems (i.e. State Medicare/Medicaid Eligibility Systems) for verifying residency status of individuals. This isn't really new.
Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?
The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.
An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.
I know people are generally really cynical of SCOTUS these days (with some warrant), but SCOTUS is at least supposed to be neutral towards the other branches. Their job is to interpret the law, not pick and choose favorites.
In this case, I think they are not completely unreasonable. This specific move is one of the things the executive branch has been allowed to do, by previous legislators who gave it this power.
> it's my wife's fault we raised the flag upside down on January 6
Yeah, there's quite a lot of reason to believe SCOTUS is political. I think the simplest one: the conservative justices lied and/or told half-truths about their views on Roe v Wade. Under oath. The ones who lied are liars. The ones who dodged the question are politicians.
Sotomayor literally made the same types of claims about DC v Heller during her confirmation hearing, despite later joining a dissent to overturn the results. So if that's the case it runs both ways.
It's also worth pointing out that there is a gulf of difference between how a court interprets law and the constitution, and how a court interprets a previous "Precedent". Courts have a lot of power to throw out or reverse previous precedent, but much less permanent power to change interpretation of the laws themselves.
The States decide who they send to Congress to represent them. The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
> Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections
In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.
> The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
The federal government is not forcing states to use the SAVE database. They are simply not interfering with states that want to use it to "make this determination".
I'm not aware of foreign nations voting in US elections. That's up to the states to prevent as is their Constitutional duty. But no, Democrats are doing quite well in the polls, and have performed well in special elections with large turnouts in primaries.
The Supreme Court ruled that it is 100% constitutional for states to disenfranchise voters based on party affiliation. I am not constitutional expert so I'll take them at their word that this is indeed the case.
So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.
Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.
No it didn't. Is this some interpretation of yours based on a decision about gerrymandering maybe? I suggest you try again without treating your inferences as shared facts.
The opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/588/18-422/) is pretty clear. The North Carolina and Maryland redistricting committees both sought to override the will of the voters. They had specific, explicit goals for precisely how many Democrats and how many Republicans should be elected in their state, and they knew the voters would not vote in accordance with those goals, so they redrew the maps in a successful attempt to ensure the partisan balance they desired. To me that's a clear example of disenfranchisement.
The Supreme Court didn't quite rule that this was constitutional, I suppose, only that no court is allowed to consider the question.
hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1
remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all
if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028
of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override
Even if the Democrats take the House and the Senate this year, and pass a new Voting Rights Act, there's no reason to believe it will have any effect, since it will be immediately vetoed by the President. So I'm not sure your expectations are in line with reality here.
26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.
I expect the most relevant action to most people's lives will be some nasty budget showdowns (likely not affecting ICE, since they're funded for years already and attempting to touch that will not go well) and the really interesting thing to see will be whether Trump's administration attempts to reverse the executive-created (and rather arbitrary and silly) modern idea of what a "shutdown" is, or will attempt to significantly adjust the (again, kinda arbitrary anyway) traditionally categories for what does and doesn't continue to be funded.
AFAIK it's never been argued in court, it's just what someone in the executive branch in the late '70s decided should happen, and before that in the event of failure to pass a budget it was assumed that spending should continue as-is, until another budget is passed, more-or-less. It's not even clear it'd be illegal if he just went on like nothing had happened.
>They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
1. Source?
2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?
the way you know there weren't actually "hundreds of cases" is that by now there would have been DOJ prosecutions to prison of each and every one and thousands of hours of coverage on FOX et al
also if they weren't citizens they would have been deported by now
that's how we know none of the claims are true
I mean think about what's gone down the past year, citizens grabbed and disappeared by ICE for weeks, people deported to third countries they've never been to and have US travel warning for extreme danger
you think a single voting fraud wouldn't be on FOX every single night and the front page of whitehouse .gov?
it's all noise
and the irony is it's the 50% of citizen latino voters that put them in power in the first place, it's why the total panic now to scare them off from the polls when they change their minds
Again, it is the states who administer elections. Full stop. The administration is trying to undermine that. Trump and his allies have already said the Democrats can't be allowed to win.
To say the feds don't have any say in federal elections just is not really true.
Every political party and their allies say their opponents can't be allowed to win, at least the last few election cycles. It's a tired trope that "Trump is going to do xyz thing to stay in power." It's a hysteria cycle, and none of it ever comes true.
Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.
So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.
My human summarization of the decision:
- SAVE was a database established in 1986 to determine if immigrants were eligible for federal benefits
- Starting in 2005, some states used it to check their voter registrations
- By executive order, the administration merged it with the SSN database to make bulk searches easier
- Organizations sued, and a lower court said the administration had to hold off on rolling out the changes while the lawsuit was pending. The Supreme Court overruled the stay, saying the lawsuit had not proved enough merit to stop the policy while the lawsuits proceed.
- It is still up to states whether they use SAVE or not. If someone shows up in the SAVE database, the state may ask them to provide proof of citizenship.
The concern here from the dissent is that states are going to purge their voter registrations while awaiting the ruling. But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits.
Update: Per NPR, the SAVE database covers 65 million voters in 26 states, of which 28,635 have been flagged as "potential noncitizens". https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/25/the-supreme-court-rev...
In Texas, using this dataset, they were only able to bring forward 117 cases of fraudulent voting.
> But realistically, the states interested in doing this don't have enough time before midterms to do this - as they would have to then process all of the proof-of-citizenship documentation or open themselves up to mass lawsuits
Except we've seen this before. States purge roles, judge orders them to restore it, oopsie we can't do that before an election, judge permits it to continue until after the election. We've seen this with voter roll purges, gerrymandering, etc. Surprisingly it only seems like one party does this, the party that supposedly supports democracy.
[flagged]
It's not "pushing policy" if the policy has a popular mandate.
Compare the respective numbers of Democratic and Republican presidents in your lifetime who attained the office while losing the popular vote.
Popular mandate is surely 65% as the bare minimum. 51% is not a mandate, it just shows they hate you slightly less than the other guy.
Does one of them not supposedly support democracy?
Yea but those mass lawsuits won't happen or matter until after midterms at this point, so even if they did illegal stuff in the end the votes will have been suppressed successfully. In a war, if you do a war crime, the dead are still dead even if the person who committed the war crime is accountable later. In politics, if they do a criminal act like this, they win an election and never have to account for their actions, because their side won and won't call them to account.
Yeah its part corruption and the weaponized taboo of second guessing election results.
I'm convinced that even if there were large scale concerns about the legitimacy elections in the USA, they would quitely be puy to rest because God forbid we ever reckon with the fact yhat the USA might not be a perfect democracy, cant taint the image.
Anyone looking to tamper with elections now knows they can just equivalate anyone who challenges them with Jan 6ers types.
Tbf, democracy in this country is fundamentally broken when you have 4 companies that control the media and have a ton of control over how people see the world.
As I understand it, one of the main disenfranchisement tactics is to challenge ballots already cast. It's potentially very effective because the voter must see that their vote was challenged and then proactively contest it.
Does the decision make this easier?
Based on this NPR article, there are only about 28k voters nationwide on the "potentially fraudulent" list. And when Texas tried pursing theirs, they only ended up being able to act on ~100 of them.
Realistically, the rate of fraud nationwide is actually really low and this database would just a waste of time for the states that pursue it. But by holding it off the courts would be doing more to cover the administration (by giving them a plausible excuse) than letting it proceed.
Thank you, it makes me wonder why the administration is pursuing this at all. Optics? Or is there something more Stephen Miller-y going on here?
100% I think it's optics.
It reminds me of those police drug busts where they take a picture of all the drugs and it's just like a couple small bags, but they'll run the press release like "hundreds of lives saved!"
Acting like there are going to be millions of voters purged serves both party messages right now.
I'd say it serves multiple purposes. Optics is certainly one of them "look upon my works, ye Republican...".
But I think another perspective is a more dangerous effort to chip away at state responsibility for the process and procedures of voting. Once this is owned or easily influenced by a national institution then a single-party state disguised as a republic becomes far simpler to implement.
The danger here being that our system has relied on decentralized states handling these tasks and thus has not created the guardrails necessary (if ever they could survive a unitary executive theory) to ensure fairness.
> it makes me wonder why the administration is pursuing this at all.
Why do we pursue murderers? There are not that many.
Either the law matters or it does not. Pick your own world to live in, but be consistent.
> We are hypocrites if, at great expenditure, we don't use flock cameras to enforce jaywalking and drones to ensure all landscaping is permitted.
Okay.
Challenging cast ballots is non-scalable because it requires a lot of formal judicial process separately for each ballot challenged. Realistically a State could go after less than a thousand.
Even if you know with high certainty that a million ballots are fraudulent it is effectively impossible to challenge them because the judicial capacity required to do so doesn't remotely exist. There are adversarial scenarios where someone dumps vast numbers of fraudulent ballots and those ballots cannot be contested.
State legislatures have historically been empowered to vote in place of the people if the vote becomes infeasible or unreliable. People voting in Federal elections is largely a 20th century invention; the old methods are still available.
Every "concern" raised by the Trump administration is cover for voter disenfranchisement. Period.
Voter fraud is incredibly rare, but I have a gut feeling that electoral fraud has happened and will continue to get worse, courtesy of the same administration.
It must be remembered that every accusation from them is a confession.
For the acolytes that down vote me, at least make your case on where and why I am wrong. My comment is as a citizen, not as a partisan.
Didn't it recently come to light of NJ registering thousands of non-citizens to vote?
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/trump-overstates-magnitude...
So what's the allowed level of voter fraud we should accept? And the fact check is about votes not registered voters. Funny how it focuses on national elections when local elections can be swayed by handfuls of votes.
What level of suppression of legitimate voters are we willing to accept in order to avoid voter fraud?
See, there are always two kinds of errors. In the case of voting, one kind is where you let someone vote who shouldn't, and the other is where you don't let someone vote who should. And when you try to decrease one, you increase the other, because you don't have a perfect system.
So, how much suppression of legitimate voters should we accept in order to decrease voter fraud? I think the answer should be "no more voters should be suppressed than there are fraudulent votes cast, and preferably fewer".
Well, how many fraudulent votes are cast? There is little evidence that it's a large problem. In the absence of such evidence, I do not thing that there should be large changes to try to eliminate the fraudulent votes that exist, because they are likely to cause more problems the other direction.
Note well: I do not approve of fraudulent votes. But even more I disapprove of creating a large problem to fix a small one.
Who is the editor on this article? Why would they expect the reader to know what the SAVE database is and what its original purpose was for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
> Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.
The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database
> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
https://apnews.com/article/save-database-noncitizen-voters-t...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-save-system...
>> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)
>It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
How's the database used? From what I can tell it's a database of non-citizens that claimed benefits, so using it as a blacklist against voter rolls seems... fine? Even if the original premise of "there's hoards illegal immigrants voting" is questionable.
> It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.
Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote. So even if they use SAVE to "flag" potential voters, they are still going to have to provide people a way to provide proof of citizenship.
But certain groups are probably more likely than others to need to worry about having to prove their citizenship. You don't need to make it impossible for people to vote, you just need to create enough friction that some of them won't who otherwise would.
>Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote.
Yes they can. States can deny citizens the right to vote for "participation in rebellion, or other crime", as per the 14th Amendment and felons are often denied the right to vote. They can't do so on the basis of "race, color or former servitude" (15th Amendment) and probably not any other protected class reason (sex, religion, ethnicity) but that implicitly gives states the right to do so for any other reason.
> Constitutionally, states cannot deny citizens the right to vote
You sure?
Citizens currently serving a prison term for the conviction of a felony cannot vote.
Citizens found mentally incompetent by a court cannot vote.
Wow I haven’t heard of the SAVE database at all before today, despite knowing about e-verify and SEVIS and similar programs. Reading Wikipedia there’s also VIS and PCQS, two more systems I haven’t heard of. It seems that the country’s distaste for a national ID not only forces each state to issue IDs but also the federal government to create a patchwork of slightly different ID programs.
> the country’s distaste for a national ID
The main issue is not distaste per se, though there are bi-partisan factions that oppose a national ID.
The Supreme Court has consistently asserted that a mandatory Federal ID is unconstitutional because that is a power reserved for the individual States. It is the same reason everyone has a Social Security card but they are explicitly not to be used as an ID. Every time Congress has tried to constructively invent a loophole to work around this prohibition the Supreme Court disallowed it.
The US government can issue IDs. Many people have multiple Federal IDs. The US government just can't make everyone have one or use them. It is what it is.
I was wondering what this was.
SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
For as long as you make it possible and attractive for new immigrants to join the this Ponzi schemw
Calling the welfare state a Ponzi scheme doesn’t magically make every new entrant a net contributor.
Why would you ever want to be a net contributor to a Ponzi scheme?
As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.
Two things:
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
Serious attempts to analyze the budget with the goal of addressing over-spending generally omit Social Security, because it's paid for with a dedicated tax. Repealing Social Security entirely wouldn't do much to address the budget deficit, certainly nowhere near as much as naive "look at how bit that part of this pie graph is!" analyses suggest it would.
Actually, the even more serious budget analyses than the ones you've read include Social Security
Because the social security surplus was used to fund the treasury instead of being put towards social security. The 1990s budget surplus that became the Bush tax cuts? Yeah that was the money that was supposed to pay for social security.
Surprising. Is that something common in Econ literature or something? It's definitely not the norm in poli sci journals, unless something's changed in the decade or so since I looked at many of those, since it just crowds out and distorts things that do contribute to the deficit.
It does hold government debt, but that's not really useful and puts it in a totally different category from "spending that contributes to the budget deficit".
Have fun comparing defense vs welfare/entitlements per year.
Link the comparison please. I already know what the numbers are
Since 2001 the US has spent 29.7 Trillion on entitlements excluding social security vs 18 Trillion of military spending.
Of course the entitlements are useful spending - these are things people need and benefit from. Had these dollars not been spent by the US government, they would have been spent directly by the taxpayers for the same goods and services. While some money may have been saved if this spending were private, it probably wouldn't change the total economic impact by much.
On the other hand we have nothing to show for the $18 trillion burned on wars that went horrifically. If we'd put that money into useful investments such that it paid interest and stopped our defense spending, we would be running a $300 billion per year surplus right now with no cuts to any other government services, to say nothing of the potential economic advantages if the wars had just never happened.
And don't get me started on the $10 trillion lost to the Bush tax cuts and their extensions.
> 29.7 Trillion on entitlements excluding social security
Convenient to exclude SS for ... no reason other than it makes your numbers look better because its a vast majority of entitlement spending so it makes your argument look bad.
May I ask you provide numbers including all entitlement spending, which includes SS?
This is what I meant by knowing what the numbers are.
The purpose of my response was that using Friedman's quote was hypocritical when expensive wars are fought and taxes on the wealthy are cut (a point ignored). It's also unclear to what extend the undocumented are a burden on the welfare state in relation to the above. The current party in power, with the exception of Senator Rand Paul, seem remarkably unconcerned with the $40 trillion deficit.
In my life I have known dozens (maybe hundreds?) of so-called illegal aliens. They all tell the same story: they came to the US to earn money to support their families. I have NEVER heard someone tell me they came to the US to vote, or they intend to vote, or they even know what voting is. So, this idea that millions of illegals are voting just doesn't align with my reality, and honestly, I don't think it aligns with any reality.
The only case I've heard of a so-called illegal alien voting was, I believe, from the 2020 election, some girl from Texas, who was brought over from Mexico when she was a baby. I believe she was in her early-30s or late-20s, spent her entire life in the US, educated and worked as a nurse. However, her US citizenship was never finalized, and she didn't realize it. She just assumed she was a citizen since she spent her entire life in the US. So, if this is what we're spending countless tax dollars to detect and prevent, well, that's just ridiculous. That money should be spent identifying people like her, and fast-tracking their citizenship.
> so-called illegal aliens
What's "so-called illegal aliens" mean in this context? Are they illegal aliens or are they not? Where does the ambiguity of legality come from?
Undocumented is the much broader term which doesn't carry the negative connotation that somebody living here is an "alien". They may have come here illegally, or their status may be in limbo, they could be a refugee seeking asylum, they could have overstayed their visa, they could be waiting on a ruling from an immigration court, or waiting to appear in court.
The administration could have decided to revoke their status. A judge could have put a stay in place because deportation would mean returning them to a dangerous situation. See the Abrego Garcia case. Some don't even know their status since their parents brought them here at a young age.
So you see it's not as simple as branding everyone an "illegal alien". That's political propaganda at work.
The money is being spent because Trump cannot admit that he lost at something. He knows his approval is extremely low, so he prefers chaos and say “they cheated, I didn’t lose”
Heads, I win. Tails, they cheated.
It's not a real issue but it has the base riled up. A MAGA acquaintance told me he was a "single issue voter" based on that fear. I think he phrased it that way to sound principled but the very aspect of being a "single issue voter" shows a lack of understanding of the full impact of that vote.
What the Right has done is take the fact that there are some communities (in liberal areas) that have allowed non-citizens to vote in community issues, which is not entirely unreasonable. They then mash up that "fact" and trumpet it as an attack on our system by "illegals".
Their dishonesty knows no bounds.
My prediction is that republican-led states are going to implement this for voting and throw their state elections into chaos, while states that don't implement do just fine.
"Chaos" defined as "Only Republican voters can figure out how to vote"
The DHS SAVE which is the same backend data source used by CMS HUB Verify Lawful Presense (VLP) has been used by State systems (i.e. State Medicare/Medicaid Eligibility Systems) for verifying residency status of individuals. This isn't really new.
Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
Sounds like something Philip K Dick came up with.
Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?
The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.
An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.
I know people are generally really cynical of SCOTUS these days (with some warrant), but SCOTUS is at least supposed to be neutral towards the other branches. Their job is to interpret the law, not pick and choose favorites.
In this case, I think they are not completely unreasonable. This specific move is one of the things the executive branch has been allowed to do, by previous legislators who gave it this power.
> it's my wife's fault we raised the flag upside down on January 6
Yeah, there's quite a lot of reason to believe SCOTUS is political. I think the simplest one: the conservative justices lied and/or told half-truths about their views on Roe v Wade. Under oath. The ones who lied are liars. The ones who dodged the question are politicians.
Sotomayor literally made the same types of claims about DC v Heller during her confirmation hearing, despite later joining a dissent to overturn the results. So if that's the case it runs both ways.
It's also worth pointing out that there is a gulf of difference between how a court interprets law and the constitution, and how a court interprets a previous "Precedent". Courts have a lot of power to throw out or reverse previous precedent, but much less permanent power to change interpretation of the laws themselves.
Interested to read about these claims (and which case intended to overturn DC v Heller) but that would just make the Roberts court more political.
> Courts have a lot of power to throw out or reverse previous precedent
Yes, we've seen the death of stare decisis.
> less permanent power to change interpretation of the laws themselves.
They have to work harder to do it but this court has not been shy about reinterpeting everything through the Calvinball (originalism) lens.
Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections is what Democrats need to retake control of Congress?
Which is the unconstitutional part?
The States decide who they send to Congress to represent them. The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
> Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections
In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.
> The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.
The federal government is not forcing states to use the SAVE database. They are simply not interfering with states that want to use it to "make this determination".
What did he mean, then? How will this action to prevent foreign nationals from voting in American elections secure the win for Republicans?
Implying that this administration and its sycophantic accomplices act in good faith is itself a bad faith argument.
That wasn't my implication/argument
What a crazy thing to commit a felony for. Almost beyond belief.
By the hundreds: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/07/21/governor-software-er...
I'm not aware of foreign nations voting in US elections. That's up to the states to prevent as is their Constitutional duty. But no, Democrats are doing quite well in the polls, and have performed well in special elections with large turnouts in primaries.
The Supreme Court ruled that it is 100% constitutional for states to disenfranchise voters based on party affiliation. I am not constitutional expert so I'll take them at their word that this is indeed the case.
So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.
Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.
No it didn't. Is this some interpretation of yours based on a decision about gerrymandering maybe? I suggest you try again without treating your inferences as shared facts.
The opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/588/18-422/) is pretty clear. The North Carolina and Maryland redistricting committees both sought to override the will of the voters. They had specific, explicit goals for precisely how many Democrats and how many Republicans should be elected in their state, and they knew the voters would not vote in accordance with those goals, so they redrew the maps in a successful attempt to ensure the partisan balance they desired. To me that's a clear example of disenfranchisement.
The Supreme Court didn't quite rule that this was constitutional, I suppose, only that no court is allowed to consider the question.
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Stop calling it a theory. It's an excuse.
hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1
remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all
if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028
of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override
Even if the Democrats take the House and the Senate this year, and pass a new Voting Rights Act, there's no reason to believe it will have any effect, since it will be immediately vetoed by the President. So I'm not sure your expectations are in line with reality here.
26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.
I expect the most relevant action to most people's lives will be some nasty budget showdowns (likely not affecting ICE, since they're funded for years already and attempting to touch that will not go well) and the really interesting thing to see will be whether Trump's administration attempts to reverse the executive-created (and rather arbitrary and silly) modern idea of what a "shutdown" is, or will attempt to significantly adjust the (again, kinda arbitrary anyway) traditionally categories for what does and doesn't continue to be funded.
AFAIK it's never been argued in court, it's just what someone in the executive branch in the late '70s decided should happen, and before that in the event of failure to pass a budget it was assumed that spending should continue as-is, until another budget is passed, more-or-less. It's not even clear it'd be illegal if he just went on like nothing had happened.
I think given the past history it is reasonable to assume the executive branch will ignore the budget and spend and raise money how it wants.
> find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases
They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
>They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.
1. Source?
2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?
I responded several places with some links. Source: the government.
the way you know there weren't actually "hundreds of cases" is that by now there would have been DOJ prosecutions to prison of each and every one and thousands of hours of coverage on FOX et al
also if they weren't citizens they would have been deported by now
that's how we know none of the claims are true
I mean think about what's gone down the past year, citizens grabbed and disappeared by ICE for weeks, people deported to third countries they've never been to and have US travel warning for extreme danger
you think a single voting fraud wouldn't be on FOX every single night and the front page of whitehouse .gov?
it's all noise
and the irony is it's the 50% of citizen latino voters that put them in power in the first place, it's why the total panic now to scare them off from the polls when they change their minds
New Jersey, my bad: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/07/21/governor-software-er...
Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-charges-16...
Why not link it here so we can all read their report
New Jersey, my bad: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/07/21/governor-software-er...
Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...
>hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania
This something like an order of magnitude lower than the error margin.
Florida elected George W by 437 votes in 2000.
Al Franken won a senate seat by 312 votes in 2008
A Maine House seat was won by 1 vote in 2024
1 illegal vote is too many.
Again, it is the states who administer elections. Full stop. The administration is trying to undermine that. Trump and his allies have already said the Democrats can't be allowed to win.
To say the feds don't have any say in federal elections just is not really true.
Every political party and their allies say their opponents can't be allowed to win, at least the last few election cycles. It's a tired trope that "Trump is going to do xyz thing to stay in power." It's a hysteria cycle, and none of it ever comes true.
Even assuming the found "hundreds" there's over seven million votes in Pennsylvania.
Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.
So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.
show it to us bud
New Jersey, my bad: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/07/21/governor-software-er...
Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...
4 people charged with election fraud in PA and 400 votes in NJ due to software error that was ultimately caught.
Basically what every election fraud expert has been saying. There's always a dozen or so cases per year and the occasional glitch that gets caught.
that's the best Trump can muster to justify a "stolen election"?
No idea about a stolen election, that's not what I said. I said hundreds of illegal voters, and you said "show it to us bud" and I showed it to you
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