The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.
The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.
NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.
For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources.
Don’t you have to register to vote?…
Illegal immigrants don’t even have social security numbers…
They are promoting the disproven conspiracy theory that illegals are impersonating US citizens and then casting ballots under false names.
Greg Palast’s reporting proved that they are trying to purge minority and left leaning voters from voting rolls.
Are the illegals voting in elections in the room with us right now?
There was talk of establishing a national ID in the 90s but republicans revolted saying it would be the number of the beast. I guess their principles on the matter depend on whether the beast in question is Trump or Clinton. There would definitely be scope creep for such an ID, much like the SSN. I say just make it a national ID and eliminate the need to register to vote.
They were against the Beast because they didn’t know they’d agree with his policies.
Given that US citizens are getting immigration court notices and even getting deported, I’m sure this is a very accurate and trustworthy system.
We are in the dumbest timeline.
Does an independent civillian organization maintain this list? Or is the servers gonna be located at trump tower and orange fuckface just deleted anyone with dark skin tone. from the “citizen” list?
(Rhetorical question, we all know the real answer lol)
I see nothing wrong with making sure people who vote are citizens, what I object to is kicking actual citizens off the voting roles because they’re not Republicans.
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with this proposal, however, if we know one thing about this regime, it’s that they will use anything as a political tool for their advantage. So, it’s very likely that Trump uses this project as an avenue to revoke the citizenship of his perceived political enemies. It’s probably a good idea to get a passport issued before this gets started so it’s at least a little bit harder for them to claim you aren’t a citizen.
Not saying it’s unreasonable to err on the side of caution in opposing anything Trump does, but the move to end birthright citizenship is aimed at the automatic citizenship granted to anyone born on US soil, and anyone born anywhere with at least one American parent. The goal is to suppress non-white voting by invalidating citizenships for people MAGA considers “foreigners”. Most Americans were born in America to American-born parents, and have nothing to worry about unless MAGA tries to redefine citizenship at the Constitution level.
You should absolutely see something wrong. This is solving a problem that doesn’t exist, which means it’s actually trying to solve a different “problem”, namely that minorities get to vote.
Person from outside the US here. Please explain me why this is a problem?
In the EU only citizens can vote in national elections, for local elections non-citizens can vote only if they are residents.
I think in most cases where this administration seems to have a good idea it’s important to remember that it’s likely designed to keep them in power.
A national database that the trump admin controls will 100% be exploited for their own gain, just like every other aspect of government is being exploited for their gain now.
A national database that the trump admin controls will 100% be exploited for their own gain
You mean, weaponized.
You already can’t vote if you’re not a citizen. There are voter rolls and you get checked off when you go vote.
This almost certainly will be used to deport people without going through due process.
What happens if someone is illegitimately removed from this database? How can you show whether it was a glitch, or deliberate? How do you know if the information they have about you is even right, or get it changed if you need to? Where’s the accountability?
See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide. The government and the software company both knew about the bug causing the issue, too, but prosecutions continued. “If the computer says it, it must be right”, sort of danger.
See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide.
The database is the least important part of the system: the organizational structure, rules, and procedures are way more important, because they actively help or harm people.
The database is the backbone of them being able to hurt or harm so I’d say it’s pretty important. Here’s the other problem though. The federal government under Trump is having a really difficult time protecting the personal identifiable information of the citizens. Not only have they allowed private companies to access that data (palantir etc), but they are also having a lot of difficulties with cyber attacks. Part of the reason those cyber attacks haven’t been as effective as they could be is because the data isn’t localized in one place. Now that’s exactly what they’re trying to do with this.
That’s a really weird way of looking at it. Without the database, there’s no central ledger to consult as to whether or not you’re legally a person. Like @atrielienz@lemmy.world said:
The database is the backbone of them being able to hurt or harm
Without that starting point, “the organizational structure, rules, and procedures” that rely on the data from the database are impotent.
That’s a really weird way of looking at it.
That’s how I roll.
Without the database, there’s no central ledger to consult as to whether or not you’re legally a person.
We’re already seeing them do that without a database. 🤷♂️
Other countries are able to maintain internal databases without using them to screw over their own citizens (except when they do). The problem isn’t the database.
Because they want to use the data for more nefarious purposes to displace non-white American voters.
With everything he does the issue is the implementation. Deport criminal aliens? I’m all for it, but most of the deportees have no criminal record or they accuse them of crimes as if it’s the same thing as a conviction.
Part of Trump’s grand plan is to make federal elections span only a single day. So maybe you check your status the day before and everything is fine, but the day of voting a glitch in the system says it can’t verify your citizenship. That’s it! No votes for you this year!
So if you vote against him, you lose citizenship and he gets 100% of the votes?
There is no evidence of voter fraud from people who actually vote. This is blatant government overreach to secure illegitimate votes, “if they’re in the system, then they can vote.”
This system will only lead to inflation of “bot” or fake identities to inflate voter numbers for any particular candidate polling.
Where I live we have something called the electoral roll, which is a nationwide database of registered voters.
It’s weird the states don’t also have this already.
I’m fairly sure we already do, but they are administered state by state, and not centralized.
Yeah, it is called voter rolls.
So, states already have their list of registered voters, this is about culling people from that list the state doesn’t think should really be there (but really specifically those supporting the opposition of the party in power, typically Republicans removing minority groups).
The reason removing people is a real thing that needs to happen is that people aren’t permanent citizens of a state, they’re just residents, and what state they are a resident of for voting purposes is extremely easy to change, and doesn’t really require notifying the state you’re leaving, just the one you now want to be a resident of.
The reason this specific thing is bullshit is that every time anyone does any kind of check for non-citizens voting, it’s basically non-existent. Instead, they’re going to use the pretense of checking citizenship to check other information, which they’ll selectively find other discrepancies in to remove people who are registered, but are likely to support their opposition. Likely with little time before an election, so hopefully they don’t find out until it’s too late or other frictions cause them to forgo voting voluntarily.
This must be opposed by all state authorities
The posts on this thread are evidence that people don’t actually care about the policies; if there is an oompa loompa behind it, it must be bad.
Almost every move the current US administration has done to cut red tape has been utterly stupid. This one actually makes sense. Having a separate citizenship database for every state is just silly.
