Trump Administration’s Legally Dubious Misuse of Social Security Data Risks Disenfranchising Eligible Voters

Friday, December 12 is the deadline for public comments on a policy the Trump Administration secretly adopted in May, giving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) access to personal data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) on nearly every U.S. resident. DHS has been encouraging states to use this data to reverify the citizenship of voters, and DHS says state voting officials have already queried these data tens of millions of times. A court order recently forced the Administration to disclose the arrangement and allow public input.

The Administration policy raises significant legal, privacy, and other concerns. One of the most serious is that Social Security data don’t have complete or up-to-date citizenship information, so using them to verify citizenship will almost inevitably lead to errors — potentially disenfranchising U.S. citizen voters ahead of the midterm elections.

According to the data-sharing agreement between DHS and SSA, the Administration radically transformed DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) tool, which was created to verify immigration-related eligibility for certain federal benefit programs, by giving the SAVE system access to information on the more than 500 million people who have ever applied for a Social Security number (SSN). The agreement also indicates that the Administration has been allowing states, for the first time, to conduct bulk searches of sensitive data collected by SSA to check the citizenship status of registered voters.

A lawsuit revealed the details of this previously undisclosed data-sharing agreement, months after tens of millions of Americans’ records had already been accessed. Though only a tiny share of registered voters has even been flagged by these reviews so far — 0.015 percent in Texas and 0.014 percent in Louisiana — the stakes of errors are high, because they could block access to the ballot box for U.S. citizens.

DHS itself recently acknowledged that using SSA data to validate voters’ citizenship status “may produce inaccurate results” that current procedures can’t necessarily correct.

For people not receiving Social Security benefits, SSA has long stated that its citizenship data are incomplete, can be outdated, and “do not provide definitive information on U.S. citizenship.” While SSA data can be helpful in proving that someone is a citizen — for example, to meet Medicaid’s citizenship requirements — the data have several well-known shortcomings in proving that someone isn’t a citizen.

A 2006 SSA audit estimated that nearly 18 million records in which a person’s citizenship was indicated contained incorrect information. And elsewhere SSA reported that about a quarter of its records don’t have an indication of citizenship at all. That’s because the database of SSNs was designed to provide the information needed to accurately administer Social Security — not to form part of a national citizenship registry.

As a result, SSA doesn’t have complete data even on native-born citizens. For SSNs issued before 1972, SSA didn’t require evidence of citizenship, and SSA didn’t consistently collect citizenship information until 1981. Even now, Social Security data aren’t sufficient to verify U.S. citizenship for people who were born abroad, such as children of military personnel.

In addition, SSA’s records on naturalized citizens have never been, or needed to be, fully up to date — and the Administration has made things worse. Until last year, SSA’s records only reflected people’s naturalized citizenship status once they visited a local office with documents proving their status. This created significant lags, since SSA didn’t require updates until an individual needed to get a replacement card or claim benefits. To increase efficiency and accuracy, in 2024 SSA began automatically updating its records for newly naturalized citizens through data matching with DHS. But in March the Trump Administration indefinitely suspended that agreement, so many naturalized citizens don’t have accurate citizenship data in SSA’s files.

(It’s important to note that while SSA issues SSNs to some non-citizens with lawful immigration status to allow them to perform authorized work and pay taxes into the Social Security system, an SSN alone can’t be used to vote in federal elections.)

These significant limitations mean that using SSA data to determine voters’ citizenship status will produce errors, potentially disenfranchising U.S. citizens. The public still has a chance to weigh in on the potential for such grave errors by commenting here. Commenters should consider raising concerns about the risk of disenfranchising U.S. citizen voters by using data ill-suited for verifying citizenship.