Trump officials have your voting records. Voting security punched in face Opinion
Dan Birdsong is senior lecturer of political science at the University of Dayton. Free, fair and secure elections are essential to representative democracy, whether in the U.S. Congress or the Ohio Statehouse. Few Americans would dispute that. But if the goal is to protect our elections, we should worry less about a virtually nonexistent fraud problem and more about what the SAVE America Act would actually do. The SAVE America Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is before the U.S. Senate, raises serious data privacy concerns. This has received less attention than its registration requirements and warrants serious scrutiny.
Frank LaRose has already turned over Ohio’s records
The bill mandates every state submit its complete voter rolls to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security within 30 days of enactment. The rolls would be screened through the SAVE database — a system originally built in 1986 to verify immigration status for public benefits applicants, not to audit voter eligibility. The bill specifies no restrictions on how the federal government may use that data once received. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has already transferred the voter registration data of 7.9 million Ohioans – including names, addresses, dates of birth and driver’s license and Social Security numbers – to the U.S. Department of Justice. LaRose also signed a court-enforceable, 20-year settlement agreement committing Ohio to support the U.S. Department of Homeland Security obtaining “full use of state driver’s license records.”
Requiring states to hand over voter rolls to the federal government with no statutory limits on its use is not an election security measure. It is a data collection mandate with no guardrails. The misuse of data isn’t abstract: according to a January 2026 DOJ court filing, DOGE employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about using Social Security data to match against state voter rolls to “overturn election results in certain states.” Supporters of the SAVE America Act argue these new requirements are needed to keep noncitizens from registering to vote and voting. Securing voter registration to strengthen election integrity is an important goal. The good news is existing law and safeguards are already working. In Utah, the state audited 2 million voter records spanning nine months. They found one noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes. The Brennan Center conducted a study of voter fraud in 2016 and found 30 suspected noncitizen votes out of 23.5 million cast [0.0001%]. Letters: Our voting records aren’t Trump’s damn business. LaRose sold Ohio out. Even the Heritage Foundation’s own fraud database – maintained specifically to document this problem – has found only 79 confirmed cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. And the Bipartisan Policy Center reports many states started using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program in 2025 to verify voter citizenship. This verification program shows just 0.04% of voter verification cases are returned as noncitizens. LaRose is confident in the 2024 election, and we all should be, too. In addition to data privacy concerns, research shows 21 million eligible U.S. citizens lack ready access to documents the SAVE Act will require to vote. Americans most likely affected by the SAVE America Act are seniors, low-income voters, married women who have changed names, rural voters, Native Americans and veterans who move frequently. College students are likely to face new burdens to register to vote and maintain their registration since they change residences year to year. Opinion: Far fewer Ohio women could vote if top election officer gets way Arizona tried this before. The result? Some 31,000 eligible voters were blocked from state and local elections – with the burden falling disproportionately on Native American communities and college students. In Kansas a similar story unfolded between 2013 to 2016 where more than 35,000 Kansans were unable to register to vote. Ohioans, no matter their partisanship, want fair, secure elections. The SAVE Act does little to secure elections. Chaos: What happened when Kansas tried a version of Trump’s SAVE Act? States have safeguards already in place that are effective in keeping our elections secure. Rather, the SAVE Act places new burdens on voters, potentially purging millions of Americans from voter registration rolls unfairly. What is more, it creates a potential Pandora’s box of voter data privacy concerns by giving the federal government unprecedented access to voter data without any limits on how it uses that data.
Dan Birdsong is senior lecturer of political science at the University of Dayton.Dan Birdsong is senior lecturer of political science at the University of Dayton. This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio surrendered voter data early, putting us at risk | Opinion
Dan Birdsong is senior lecturer of political science at the University of Dayton. Free, fair and secure elections are essential to representative democracy, whether in the U.S. Congress or the Ohio Statehouse. Few Americans would dispute that. But if the goal is to protect our elections, we should worry less about a virtually nonexistent fraud problem and more about what the SAVE America Act would actually do. The SAVE America Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is before the U.S. Senate, raises serious data privacy concerns. This has received less attention than its registration requirements and warrants serious scrutiny.
