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Former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor sounded the alarm against a piece of tech he thinks his ex-boss is trying to use to block voters from the polls.
According a column on his Substack for the group DEFIANCE.org, Taylor said that an immigration-verification tool called SAVE would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections, which are traditionally run by states and local governments. SAVE stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.
One of the key reasons that the American elections are so difficult to hack is how decentralized they are. Each state has its own election rules, and each county has its own process. So there are thousands of different variables. A foreign adversary that breaches one system can only impact that specific jurisdiction. But if Trump creates a centralized federal database, it would be a massive change that could be hacked all in one place. Taylor called it a kind of "Master Switch" that a foreign adversary could flip to decide that millions of people are suddenly ineligible to vote.
"Former homeland security officials like myself have watched in slow-motion horror as the administration moves to hand control of American elections to a tiny DHS office (partially run by contractors) that receives the least congressional oversight and scrutiny of almost any corner of the department," wrote Taylor.
What makes SAVE different is that it's already a program being implemented under DHS for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). That office operates independently of Congress because it is funded by immigration application fees rather than congressional appropriations.
"In my experience, offices like that behaved like fiefdoms, because functionally they were, i.e. they were self-funding, self-directing, and accustomed to minimal scrutiny. That also means they’re places where it’s especially tough to shine a light," Taylor warned.
SAVE wasn't built to handle elections, though. The aim was to stop benefits fraud.
An example he cited comes from Missouri, which used SAVE's database to make allegations about "noncitizen voters" before it ever actually verified them. Local clerks were told to flag them as temporarily unable to vote.
"In hundreds of cases the tool was simply wrong, and in one county more than half of those flagged as noncitizens proved to be U.S. citizens. In another case, Texas flagged 2,724 voters as suspicious based on SAVE data and began demanding proof of citizenship, only to discover some of those removed already had proof on file with the state, which ordered them reinstated," Taylor revealed.
He said that it's clearly disenfranchising voters. Already seven states have run roughly 35 million voters through the system and flagged 4,200 people. That's 0.01 percent of voters. Those haven't even been verified for accuracy. Now Trump wants to deploy it across the U.S. to decide whether people get to vote.
He recalled during his time at DHS that they had been doing a deep dive into what Russia did to the U.S. during the 2016 election and noted that experts are still trying to map out everything ten years later.
"In its comprehensive review, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russian actors targeted election systems in all fifty states; in one, Illinois, they evidently penetrated the voter database and were 'in a position to delete or change voter data.' So why weren’t they able to manipulate the election outcome? Well, one reason is that there wasn’t some central nervous system for them to attack. Our elections are scattered across those all of those fifty states and thousands of counties, on different systems built by different vendors. So breaking into Illinois only got them as far as Illinois," he said.
Under Trump's new system, "a savvy hacker" or a group of hacktivists like "Anonymous" could easily access whether an entire party or demographic could be blocked from the polls.
Finally, he warns that centralizing voter eligibility would also give whoever controls the White House a lot of influence at a time when Americans already don't trust the executive branch.
He championed the states refusing to turn over voter-roll data, noting that they are protecting election security, not undermining it.