Trump Administration Develops a Searchable Database to Monitor Citizens

Donald Trump’s obsession with making sure only citizens vote in elections, despite overwhelming evidence that voter fraud is extremely rare, is reaching its logical conclusion. According to a report from NPR, the Trump administration is in the process of building a searchable national citizenship data system, the first of its kind in the country, with few guardrails in place for how it is used.

According to the report, the database is a collaborative effort between the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Governmental Efficiency, and will be maintained by the DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. The agencies have been working to tie together federal databases to create a system that state and county election officials can use to look up the citizenship status of anyone on their voter lists. The database, which will reportedly contain information about both U.S.-born and naturalized citizens, will use data pulled from the Social Security Administration and immigration databases. Remember that whole showdown DOGE had over its effort to suck up SSA data? That’s feeling mighty relevant right about now.

There are many shocking things about the development of this national database. Chief among them is the fact that its development has happened primarily behind the curtains. Most Americans probably have few doubts that their data is being collected by the government, but would also probably prefer to know what is being done with it. After all, about two-thirds of Americans believe the risk of the government collecting data outweighs the benefits. Now their data is being included in a database that they are unaware of and has no clear restrictions on how it can be used. That’s probably not going to ease anyone’s concerns.

The United States has historically rejected the idea of maintaining a centralized database of its citizens’ information. While there is plenty of data collection that occurs, from the IRS to the Census, that gives us an idea of how many people are in the country and who they are, that has never been used to create a national roster that tells officials every person in the country, biographical information about them, and where they live.

The database will ostensibly be available to election officials so they can confirm the citizenship of voters on their rolls which, again, is a thing that simply does not happen. The conservative Heritage Foundation has a database of “proven” cases of voter fraud that dates back to the 1980s, and there are 68 cases of non-citizens allegedly voting. But without any sort of obvious protections in place, it’s possible the database could be abused by bad actors.

There are also real doubts that the data will be reliable, as none of it was collected for this purpose. Even the SSA data is often missing citizenship tags, according to the Institute for Responsive Government. Surely nothing bad will come from a nationwide database with incomplete information and there won’t be any false accusations of voter fraud because of it, right?