American Thinker

by Clarice Feldman

    The Trump Administration’s latest Supreme Court victory is a tribute to its persistence and innovation. It is, as well, a measure of the great changes in governance for which we owe thanks to Elon Musk and DOGE.

    Stymied by the congressional refusal to enact the SAVE Act, which would put teeth in the constitutional proscription against non-citizen voting in federal elections, the Administration kept searching for other ways to ensure that non-citizens did not vote in federal elections. Under a 1996 law, Section 1373(c), the federal government must provide state and local officials, upon request, verification of the citizenship of voters. The system in use before this Administration stepped in was an archaic, unworkable clunker which made a joke of the legal requirement. This relic, the Systematic Verification Act for Entitlements (SAVE, not to be confused with the proposed SAVE Act), had been in the law books since 1986. That little-utilized forty-year-old law allowed federal, state, and local governments to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens who applied for public benefits. That no one apparently used it to verify voter eligibility (or even benefit eligibility) is no surprise. This Administration dug into it, found it was not suitable for the purpose of citizen verification, and altered it. The very mechanics set up for the SAVE verification scheme were expensive for users and unwieldy (if not impossible) to meet its stated purpose of benefit eligibility, nor a broader purpose -- voter eligibility.

    Under this Trump Executive Order, officials may access this system free and in bulk, right now. Previously, they could do so only one name at a time and were charged by DHS for access. Due to DOGE’s work, the database includes all citizens, not just aliens, and for the first time, it allows bulk searches. These searches can be made by name, birthday, and Social Security number. And this is an enormous, important change.

    Election officials can now upload their entire voter database and immediately get back a list of suspected non-citizens.

    The real innovation, per Jeff Childers, is the Social Security number link “because it made the database actually useful. Election officials have Social Security numbers. They usually don’t have DHS immigrant IDs, which was previously the only way to search the database.”

    I have felt for a long time that the efficiency of internet operations like Amazon is the biggest challenge to sclerotic government (and business) transactions. We are getting so used to easy, rapid access to current information that we have grown to expect it in all our business dealings. Quite obviously, the old system wasn’t being used because it was costly, time-consuming, and for all practical purposes unworkable. The new system, thanks to DOGE, is fast and efficient, the easiest way for election officials to comply with the constitutional mandate.

    Naturally, you’ll hear disingenuous whining that this will scoop up and disenfranchise legal voters, that is, citizens mislabeled in the database.

    Nope. Not going to happen. If a check suggests someone is not a citizen and therefore not a person entitled to vote in federal elections, the state must send out postcards requiring those people to come in and establish they are citizens and get taken off the suspect lists. The new system is, without question, a marked, substantial, and necessary improvement.

    The District Court vacated the modified SAVE program and denied the government application for a stay pending appeal. A divided Court of Appeals also denied a stay pending appeal. The Supreme Court granted the stay, ruling that the plaintiffs’ claims likely lacked merit, that Section 1373(c) contemplates an information-sharing regime like the modified SAVE program, and that the court was likely to reverse the District Court’s holding vacating SAVE.

    The lead plaintiff in this case was the “League of Women Voters,” another once honestly non-partisan organization which in recent years regularly unmasked itself as a left-wing Democrat front. Forum shopping the case to D.C. Judge Sparkle Sookanan, the League tried to halt the only reasonable and efficient way to carry out a constitutional mandate: ensuring that votes in federal elections are cast only by eligible (that is, citizen) voters. This alone should disabuse anyone of the League’s right to be respected as a good government advocate. A more honest name for this outfit would be the League of Very Strident Left-wing Voters.