Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has joined eleven of her counterparts in sending a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) concerning their approach to making voter eligibility determinations.
At issue is the effort by the federal agency to apply its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to states’ voter lists in order to determine whether non-citizens are in fact voting in elections.
The Secretaries of State argue in their comments that the expansions being adopted by DHS would make it harder for states to ensure election integrity, compromise privacy, and lower participation.
In their letter, they argue that non-citizen voting is a rare occurrence, suggesting that the “‘problem’ that SAVE targets does not exist” and noting that they have “significant concerns that SAVE harms, rather than helps, the electoral process.”
Over the course of the twenty-nine page letter, Bellows and her colleagues outline the reasons behind their opposition to the Department’s “expansion of SAVE for voter eligibility determinations.”
“The expanded version of SAVE will introduce unnecessary and unwarranted reliability, privacy, and security issues into the sensitive voter information data we are entrusted to protect,” the Secretaries of State wrote. “It is likely to misidentify eligible voters as non-citizens and to chill participation by eligible voters.”
“What the modified system will do, however, is allow the federal government to capture sensitive data on hundreds of millions of voters nationwide and distribute that information as it sees fit,” the letter argued. “It will facilitate the federal administration’s attempt to claim for itself states’ authority to regulate and administer elections. And it threatens to expose hundreds of millions of Americans’ private data to cyberattack and misuse.”
The letter points to changes made by DHS to allow for bulk searches to be conducted and explains the manner in which information is gathered and handled by the system, breaking down their specific concerns over the system’s policies and procedures, including in comparison to other voter databases.
“The privacy implications associated with SAVE’s use are particularly pronounced given how SAVE amasses voters’ personal information and leaves that information subject to possible misuse and abuse,” they wrote. “Even where SAVE provides an initial response to a registered user that confirms a voter’s U.S. citizenship, DHS will maintain that voter’s personal information for the next decade.”
The Secretaries go on to assert recognition that only United States citizens are eligible to vote in elections, arguing that there are already “tried-and-true methods” in place for insuring this is the case that they believe carry less of a risk.
They also indicate a belief that the new changes impose upon their individual states’ rights to conduct elections by “usurp[ing]” the Secretaries’ “constitutional and statutory responsibility for voter-list maintenance.”
“There is no support for the claim that expansion of the SAVE program will give States access to a secure and accurate dataset for purposes of verifying voter eligibility,” the Secretaries of State concluded. “Indeed, DHS has not provided any information to show that the data matching in the SAVE program is reliable for purposes of voter-eligibility verification, nor demonstrated that its proposed uses of this data, including the 10-year retention period, are justified by law.”
“What is apparent from [this move], however, is that DHS is attempting to amass an unprecedented amount of private data on hundreds of millions of Americans to enable the federal government to usurp States’ constitutional authority,” they argued. “DHS should abandon this effort.”
Click Here to Read the Full Letter
Bellows personally doubled-down on these positions in the comments included in her official statement sharing this letter with Mainers.
“Americans should be proud of our free, safe and secure elections administered by the states under the Constitution,” she wrote. “These proposed changes would do nothing safeguard election integrity, but by creating a vast federal database of millions of American voters would in fact threaten the privacy and security of voter information nationwide.”
“The states, not the federal government, are in charge of elections under the Constitution to preserve checks and balances in our democracy,” said Bellows. “This is yet another attempt by the Trump Administration to upset that balance of power, subjecting lawful American voters to further review and potential disenfranchisement based on lies about the security of our elections.”
Click Here to Read Secretary Bellows’ Full Statement
This comes the same week that Bellows signed onto a joint letter sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem over the Trump Administration’s request for Maine’s voter data.
The opening paragraph of the letter references that there has been recent reporting which suggests that the DOJ has shared voter data with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Secretaries of State indicate that these reports have prompted them to “to seek clarity on whether DOJ and DHS actively misled election officials regarding the uses of voter data.”
The letter then goes on to detail instances in which the Secretaries feel that they have been given “misleading and at times contradictory information.”
[RELATED: Shenna Bellows Signs Joint Letter to Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem Concerning Requests for Voter Data]
Federal officials have previously maintained that obtaining the requested information is critical for maintaining election integrity.
In a statement shared with Maine Public in September, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon defended the federal government’s request.
“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections,” Assistant Attorney General Dhillon said. “The DOJ Civil Rights Division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”
