According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks.
The group says those lapses put the Social Security information of more than 300 million Americans at risk.
Let me guess… just in time for a 2028 election where we all suddenly need our valid SSN?
The Trump administration is building a computer system so that States can ‘verify’ a person’s citizenship prior to allowing them to vote.
This system has failed in many, many ways. That makes me think that they would use the SSN database and other intelligence sources in order to setup the system to fail at a much higher rate for everyone but likely MAGA voters.
As an Italian (but think most of EU citizens) who need to show my id card to vote, I don’t really see where is the problem if there is a check if the person could vote or not. I can agree that using the SSN maybe is not the right way but why should people who are not citizes allowed to vote ? For context, in Italy if I have my legal address (residenza) in Milan I cannot vote for the mayor of Rome, and btw, why should I ?
Like most things the GOP says, they’re lying or exaggerating.
You need to show proof of identity/citizenship to register to vote. As one piece of this process, you may choose to use your SS card. You must vote at your local polling place (or by mail). You can not travel to some other city to vote.
Organized vote fraud would be hard to do and hard to hide. The only cases were MAGA people trying to “balance out the vote fraud” from the other guys. And they were caught.
The check in the US is done when you register to vote. Once you are registered, a variety of proofs of ID can be used to vote at your polling location.
Requiring a passport and birth cert or some other strong ID are unnecessary at the actual voting site. The main reason for doing this is to make voting take longer, and be more strenuous, which means that you can have a greater effect on election results by manipulating the number of polling stations for an area.
And why the double check ? It would not be better to just go to the polling station, show your id and then vote ?
(I undestand that it is a simplification, in the US people move way more often that here and this add some other problems)
Considering that if I have no one before me to vote, it take about 30 seconds from the moment I enter the polling station and the moment I am handed the cards to cast the vote I would argue that saying that this way it will take longer is not really true.
And, btw, we do the check of the document against a printed list who containt all the names of the people who can vote at a polling station, splitted between man and women.
Every difficulty you build to try to make harder for your enemy voters to cast their vote is a difficulty you set up also for your voters.
And simply manipulating the number of polling station in a certain area give you nothing: people who want to vote against you will come anyway and you cannot know if they will come before your voters of after and which voters eventually will lose their patience and just go home without casting a vote
It’s not a double check at the polling station. They simply need to confirm that you showed up and voted today, and have a way to ID you. The actual check, that you are legally allowed to vote, and that you are actually who you say you are, and that you aren’t allowed to vote anywhere else, all happened when you register to vote. That is a long process, and that’s why it is done before you actually need to go vote.
Elections are run by the individual states (unless something egregiously unconstitutional is going on) which allows the governor and even local election officials to make decisions that affect how hard it is to vote almost down to a street level basis. If you don’t want people from blue areas to vote, you just put in fewer polling stations, and make them in less convenient places for areas that skew blue on the map. So adding 30 seconds to the voting time doesn’t really matter for a rural station that might need to service 100 people in a day, but for an inner city location that might need to service 100 people a minute those 30 seconds per person really add up.
This is a conspiracy I can get behind!
Oh yeah this part is 100% my personal inference:
It isn’t completely baseless, the DHS has created a tool called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE. The push on the right is to make it so that everyone has to prove their citizenship in order to vote. So a system like this SAVE system is what they would want to put in place to make it easy to ‘verify citizenship’ at polling places.
Having an electronic tool who’s underlying system is a complete black box and exclusively controlled by the executive branch which has been shown to incorrectly identify people’s citizenship status would allow a group acting in bad faith to surreptitiously introduce ‘errors’ that affect voters who have been identified (by the domestic spy network that is Google and Co.) as being likely opposition voters.
I’m not saying that this is what IS happening. I’m saying that this system is exactly the kind of system that you would design if you were trying to do what I’m suggesting.
Here’s a source about the system, because you shouldn’t just trust ‘people’ on the Internet:
https://www.propublica.org/article/save-voter-citizenship-tool-mistakes-confusion