Constitutional Rights PAC has spent this entire summer arguing that only American citizens should vote in American elections, that voter rolls should be accurate, and that the SAVE America Act deserves a floor vote the Senate refuses to schedule.
None of that changes today. What follows is a warning to our own side, because the verification system this whole project depends on is producing errors, and every error is a gift to the people who want the project dead.
What happened in Texas.
Last October, Texas checked its voter roll of more than 18 million registrations against a federal database called SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program. Note that this is the SAVE database, not the SAVE America Act. Different things, same underlying mission.
The check flagged 2,724 registrations as potential noncitizens. Counties in all 254 jurisdictions were told to investigate. Flagged voters received notices giving them thirty days to produce proof of citizenship or lose their registration.
Then the problems started.
County officials discovered that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship such as a passport and keeps the documentation on file. In other words, the state already had proof these people were citizens, sitting in a different state agency's records, while a federal database was flagging them as suspect.
Some counties had already removed voters who did not respond to the thirty-day notice in time.
On July 30, the state elections director told county officials that Texas had reviewed DPS records and confirmed citizenship for some of the flagged voters. Counties were instructed to immediately reinstate anyone removed who had citizenship documentation on file.
To the credit of Texas officials, they caught it and moved to fix it. That is what a functioning system does. But it should not have required catching.
Why this is a conservative problem.
Reporting by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found that the Department of Homeland Security rushed the revamped SAVE tool into service while it was still adding data and before it could reliably reflect voters' most current citizenship status.
Understand what that means politically. Twenty-three states, mostly Republican-led, have shared voter file data with the federal government for this purpose. If the tool generates false positives at scale, every one of those states produces a news story about an American citizen, usually a naturalized citizen or a young voter, who was purged from the rolls and had to fight to get back on.
Those stories do not stay local. They become the argument. They become the television ad. They become the reason a swing voter who has no objection to proof of citizenship decides that the people pushing it cannot be trusted to administer it.
We have watched this movie. The strongest case against election integrity measures has never been that citizens should not have to prove citizenship. It has been that the enforcement will be sloppy and will catch the wrong people. When the enforcement is sloppy and catches the wrong people, we have proven their case for them.
Be honest about the numbers, too.
You may see a claim circulating today that 1.2 million Texas voters were flagged. The documented figure from the reporters covering this beat is 2,724, out of more than 18 million registrations.
Conservatives should be the first to correct that, not the last. Twenty-seven hundred potential ineligible registrations is a real finding and Texas is legally obligated to investigate every one of them. It is also, plainly, not evidence of millions of noncitizens voting. Both of those sentences are true, and a movement that cannot say the second one out loud will not be believed when it says the first.
Accuracy is the entire premise of our argument. We do not get to abandon it when it is inconvenient.
What to demand instead.
The answer is not to stop verifying. The answer is to verify competently.
Check state records first. Before a single notice goes out, cross-reference the flag against the DMV or DPS files the state already holds. Texas learned this the hard way and other states can learn it for free.
Do not remove anyone on a non-response. A voter who ignores a government letter has not confessed to anything. Removal should follow a confirmed finding, not a missed deadline.
Publish the error rate. If the tool is accurate, that data helps us. If it is not, we need to know before Congress builds a national requirement on top of it.
And that last point is the one that matters most for the SAVE America Act. If Congress passes a documentary proof of citizenship requirement, it will be implemented through this infrastructure. Whatever flaws exist in the plumbing today get scaled nationwide tomorrow, and conservatives will own every mistake.
One more thing from today.
General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wrote to Senator Elissa Slotkin confirming that the military will not send troops or personnel to polling places in November.
Good. Conservatives should say so plainly. States run elections. That is constitutional design, not a technicality, and the federal power a friendly administration uses today is available to an unfriendly one later. A party that understands federalism should never want soldiers near a ballot box, regardless of who is Commander in Chief.
The bottom line.
We want the rolls clean. We want the SAVE America Act on the Senate floor. We want proof of citizenship, and we are not backing off any of it.
Which is exactly why the verification has to be right. Get it wrong and the other side will not have to beat this argument.
We will have handed it to them.
