Michel Martin, Host:

For about 250 years, the United States has gone without the list of each of its citizens. But in less than five months, the Trump administration has created a device that aims to make one. The group was designed in association with Elon Musk, government’s efficiency department, or Dogi. NPR is the first to report on the details of this new tool. One of the reporters of this story is Miles Park, and he is now here to tell us more about it. Good morning, mile.

Miles Park, Byline: Hey, Mitchell.

Martin: So what is the goal of this new system, the roll out of the administration?

Park: It is designed to verify that only American citizens are only on voter rolls, and it is a major expansion of a device that was already present within the Department of the Immigration Division of Homeland Security. This is called Save. It has been for decades, but it was initially designed to check the status of those nonsuctions which are legally in the country to decide the local governments to decide whether they have to provide benefits. Nearly a decade ago, the election authorities began using whether it was a record on whether there was a record on the voter roll, which shows that they were a nonsuxity, really natural and became eligible to vote. But now, DHS has expanded this system to find it even to American citizens, who really shocks privacy and election experts we talked to.

Martin: Okay, then just back for a minute. I think some people may be surprised to find out whether there is a system as to whether there is an American citizen or not. So can you just talk about that?

Park: I mean, people on the left have a truly long history – and then I would say, especially on the right – people do not rely in a centralized location with such sensitive data on the federal government. But the matter that is taking priority here is concerned about President Trump’s nonsuction voting, which has never shown a comprehensive problem in the US elections to be clear. Each study or attempt to highlight it has found that it occurs only in small micro numbers. And polling officials have said that verifying citizenship in cases where it is not clear that there is laborious work, and they want there were better systems for help. But the fact that this new citizenship verification tool seems to be powered by misinformation, simply can cause more problems.

Martin: How is the system considered to actually work?

Park: So basically, Sev is a device capable of pinging a bunch of different immigration databases, which is for traditionally to get a response on the situation of citizenship. Now, thanks to Dogi, the system can also ping data in Social Security Administration, which has point-in-time information on US citizens on receiving a number. So when you combine those two abilities, essentially, what DHS says is that they should legally be able to investigate the status of citizenship of almost any American in the country because almost every American now has a number.

Martin: So you have explained why this database has not happened before. But given that the first American citizens have never had a database before, is it controversial?

Park: I mean, an open question is whether it is legal, Michelle. There are federal laws that control it how new data systems could be created with personal information from Americans, and legal experts we suspected that those processes were followed in this example. Another major unknown is whether the system also works. I mean, of course, accuracy is a big thing when you talk about questioning someone’s citizenship. And a person participating in DHS briefing on the system told us that the agency has already run more than 9 million voter records through the system, but none of that analysis has been made public yet. Here Kim Vyman, who is the former Republican Secretary of the State of Washington.

Kim Wayman: It seems that it takes more than four months to the federal government to be able to create a broad national database of information.

Park: And then, finally, it is not clear what DHS is doing with all this voter data, it is once near it. I talked to a polling officer who said that they would be interested in using the equipment if it was found to be accurate, but did not try to try from his kingdom as he was worried about what else the federal government could do with that election data. We asked the immigration of DHS about all these questions, but we were not given any response.

Martin: This is the NPR mile park. Miles, thanks.

Park: Thanks.

(Soundbite of Run-DMC Song, “Down with the King”)

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