First, this effort sounds an awful lot like the same thing WIRED reported roughly two months ago. That’s not meant as a slam on NPR’s reporting, but rather on the Trump administration’s transparent efforts at repackaging what was once clearly intended to be a tool to track immigrants, all in the service of terrorizing them.
Back then, DOGE was uploading IRS, Social Security, and voting data to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database. This was around the same time that the Trump administration purposely marked 6,100 immigrants as dead, despite knowing that they were very much alive. The goal? To prevent immigrants from earning wages.
This time around, DOGE still has access to federal databases, ignoring the Privacy Act of 1974, which limits how government employees can use private data and prohibits sharing it between agencies unless the subject of the data is notified and consents.
Even if we pretend that election security is the real goal behind letting DOGE run wild, framing this as some sort of assistance to election officials is absurd. It’s just part of President Donald Trump’s theory that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 had non-citizens not voted illegally and that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The conjoined database is just a high-tech way of doing what Trump tried to do during his first term, when he convened his Election Fraud Commission to demand that every state send complete voter data—to an insecure email address, of course. After a little more than a year, the commission packed up, having failed to find any widespread voter fraud, much less the millions of non-citizens who Trump alleged voted illegally. |