Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab has agreed to share state voter roll information with federal immigration authorities to screen the state’s voter rolls for anyone living in the United States illegally or who might be dead.
Schwab’s office last month signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to run information for about 2 million Kansas voters through a federal database to match citizenship and immigration status as well as whether there’s anyone on the rolls who died.
The secretary of state’s office provided voter information that included dates of birth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.
While the office will get the immigration data, officials said they are mostly focused on flagging Kansas voters who died out of state and haven’t been removed from the rolls.
The data will be run through the so-called SAVE program, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.
The SAVE program verifies U.S citizenship, naturalized or derived U.S. citizenship, or immigration status by searching available federal databases, including those from the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, the Department of State and the Social Security Administration.
“We are thankful President Trump established this working relationship between the states and the federal government,” Schwab said in statement.
He said it has been almost a decade since the state has been able to access the Social Security Administration’s death index, which allows election officials to learn whether anyone from Kansas has died outside the state but is on the state voter rolls.
Earlier this summer, Schwab visited the White House where he met with other secretaries of state for a meeting focused on election security.
The discussion centered on enhancing information sharing between federal agencies and states, a move that was described as a step toward strengthening voter roll maintenance.
At that time, Schwab sought use of the Social Security Administration’s death index and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data to identify deceased voters and remove noncitizens from registration databases.
“This is not a partisan issue,” Schwab said in a statement at that time.
“Every state should care about the integrity of their voter rolls and should want the most accurate, up-to-date data available to do so.”
Schwab praised President Donald Trump for elevating this bipartisan issue to a national priority.
“Thank you, President Trump, for making this a priority,” Schwab said.
“No previous administration has taken the initiative to bring this tool to the states.”
Since Jan. 20, more than 42 million voters have been checked through SAVE to validate their citizenship and immigration status, the agency said.
And to date, 22 states have completed a SAVE Voter Verification Memorandum of Agreement with the federal government.
Several Republican-led states have reached agreements with Citizenship and Immigration Services to use SAVE, or announced the results.
Election officials in Ohio have started removing inactive voters from their rolls whom SAVE identified as dead.
Also, Louisiana’s secretary of state announced earlier this month that the SAVE program identified that 390 people were found to have illegally registered to vote in the state.
Of that number, 79 of those voters actually voted in Louisiana elections. Those voters are now off the state’s voter rolls, officials said.
There have been other states that have been more cautious.
In August, the North Carolina State Board of Elections tabled the topic of participating in the SAVE program. The board said it wasn’t ready to take up the issue after discussing details in a closed session.
The board’s spokesperson told NPR that election officials are pursuing “agreements to ensure that proper safeguards would be in place to protect and secure the data, if a decision is ultimately made to use the service.”
The federal immigration service relies on the states to provide what data they would like verified.
State and local officials are responsible for maintaining voter rolls and managing how voters prove their citizenship status or eligibility to vote.
The idea of sharing the voter roll data with the federal government was greeted with skepticism by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.
“This is not about election security – voters already must go through numerous obstacles to verify their citizenship and eligibility,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU.
“We have numerous examples of how insecure and error-prone government databases and sharing processes are – and this needless risk will wind up eliminating eligible voters.
“It is disappointing to see our highest election official proactively placating and putting thousands of Kansans’ data at risk,” Kubic said in a statement.
Schwab is sharing information with federal immigration enforcement authorities that he declined for now to share with the U.S. Justice Department.
The Justice Department had asked the secretary of state to provide the state’s voter registration list, including voters’ full names, birth dates, residential addresses, driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
Schwab agreed to provide the public data, but at that time he declined to supply the last four digits of Social Security numbers and the driver’s license numbers sought by the Trump administration.
Schwab said he understood that the Social Security and driver’s license data would be protected by federal privacy laws.
In this case, a spokesperson for the secretary of state said the office provided the information to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services – and not the Justice Department – because it was part of the state’s legal requirement to maintain voter rolls.
The spokesperson said that running the state’s voter registration list through the federal data bases was “routine” voter roll maintenance required by law.
State law requires county election officers to remove a voters name if it appears as deceased on information tracked by the Social Security Administration.
The only information that Social Security uses is the last four digits of the numbers it assigns to U.S. citizens, so consequently the secretary of state is mandated to provide the those numbers to maintain the voter rolls, officials said.
