Anthony Nel is the kind of voter who doesn't like to skip an election. The 29-year-old lives in the Dallas-Forth Worth area and usually votes early, which he did as recently as Texas' Nov. 4 constitutional election.
So he was disturbed last month to open a letter from his local election office in Denton County, calling into question whether he was eligible to vote at all.
"We have received information from the Texas Secretary of State reflecting that you might not be a United States citizen," read the notice.
The notice said he needed to provide proof of citizenship — such as a copy of a U.S. passport, birth certificate or naturalization certificate — within 30 days. Otherwise, his registration would be canceled, though it said he could be immediately reinstated if he showed that documentation at a later date.
Nel, who was born in South Africa, became a U.S. citizen as a teenager, more than a decade ago. Yet he is one of 2,724 people Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson identified in October as "potential noncitizens" on Texas voter rolls. Nelson came up with the tally after running the state's entire voting list — more than 18 million voters — through a federal data system known as SAVE that the Trump administration has overhauled this year.
The tally of 2,724 potential noncitizens is about 0.015% of the state's voters.
Nelson's office directed county election officials to investigate the flagged voters, including by sending out the notice Nel received. The list of voters has not been publicly released.
"I was confused because I have a passport. I've been voting for almost 10 years. Why is this happening now?" Nel recalled in an interview with NPR. "My first thought was something is going on in terms of wanting to adjust and change who is registered to vote."
Other eligible Texas voters received the same notice, though official numbers are not yet known.
Their experience underscores concerns election experts have had about the reliability of SAVE, which the Trump administration has turned into a controversial citizenship lookup tool. While the changes to SAVE have made the tool more accessible to states, the overhauled system has been widely criticized for being rolled out without public notice, congressional input or transparency about its accuracy.
President Trump has long made exaggerated claims about the prevalence of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections and his critics have expressed concern the revamped SAVE could be used to continue to push false election narratives.
47 million voters have had their data run through SAVE
Originally a data system that searched numerous Department of Homeland Security and immigration-related databases to check if foreign-born individuals are eligible for government benefits, the Trump administration has transformed SAVE into a tool that it claims can verify most Americans' citizenship or show if someone is listed as deceased.
As of May, SAVE is linked to Social Security Administration data, and can be queried with a name, date of birth and the last four numbers of a Social Security number. More recently, it has been linked to the State Department's U.S. passport database so people can be looked up with a passport number.
"SAVE is a secure, and reliable way for user states to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote," U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said in a statement to NPR. "The program is doing exactly what it is supposed to do – providing states with an easy-to-use tool to stop aliens from hijacking our elections. USCIS urges all states to adopt SAVE and join us in safeguarding the voting rights of American citizens."
More than 47 million voters have been run through SAVE, according to the agency. States that have announced their results so far have not identified large numbers of suspected noncitizens casting ballots. Louisiana found 79 likely noncitizens voted in elections going back to the 1980s, Tennessee referred 42 potential noncitizens who cast ballots to the FBI, and Indiana said it found "at least 21" noncitizens who voted.
While officials in states like Texas have praised the new SAVE tool, the Justice Department has been suing other states to get access to their voter rolls. Some state election officials have asked DOJ and DHS to clarify whether one goal is to upload state voter lists to SAVE.
"We've checked 47.5 million voter records, we have found 260,000 plus dead people enrolled," said Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon in a video released last week. "And finally that there are several thousand noncitizens who are enrolled to vote in federal elections."
NPR asked both the DOJ and USCIS whether the numbers Dhillon cited were confirmed noncitizens, or potential noncitizens. DOJ declined to comment and USCIS did not respond to that question.
In a Monday appearance on Newsmax, Dhillon speculated the number of noncitizens on voter rolls could be six figures or higher.
Voting experts have warned that known accuracy issues with SAVE will lead to eligible voters like Anthony Nel being wrongly flagged by the system and potentially disenfranchised, while the problem SAVE seeks to solve — noncitizens voting in federal elections — is incredibly rare.
A "giant omnibus database"
There are also questions about whether SAVE's overhaul complies with federal privacy laws, particularly given that it uses sensitive Social Security data for a new purpose. Last month, the judge overseeing a federal lawsuit to reverse the project's updates said she was "troubled by the recent changes to SAVE and doubts the lawfulness of the Government's actions."
But the Trump administration is taking steps to expand SAVE further and add additional data sources so it can be queried with driver's license numbers. Plans include accessing driver's license data from a private entity known as Nlets that helps law enforcement agencies share information across states.
At the end of October, DHS released a belated public notice about SAVE that said data could be shared with other government agencies and "other entities" with DHS agreements for purposes that include monitoring or auditing voter registration records.
Election officials are raising concerns about the security of voters' data, which, once uploaded to SAVE, is retained for 10 years.
"I don't think most people, most Americans, think that if they give to an elections administrator for voter registration purposes, sensitive data like a full or partial Social Security number, that it's going to end up in some sort of giant omnibus database in Washington, D.C., that can be easily shared with God knows who for God knows what reason," Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told NPR. "And that is apparently what is going on here."
Last week, Simon and 11 other Democratic secretaries of state signed a public comment opposing changes to SAVE that was among thousands of mostly critical comments. The secretaries expressed concern that USCIS has failed to release data on the tool's accuracy for identifying noncitizens.
"What you don't want out of the system is innocent people to be fingered as illegal voters," Simon said. "And there's a real capacity and concern here that that's going to happen in really large numbers."
Removed from the voter rolls
When Nel plugged his own name and birthday into Denton County's online voter registration lookup recently, the system no longer showed him as registered.
He has not yet had a chance to visit the county office and show his passport, and more than 30 days have passed since the notice was mailed. While the county would accept a passport copy over email, mail or fax, he does not feel comfortable sending a copy of a sensitive document and prefers to handle the transaction in person.
Denton County confirmed to NPR that Nel's voter registration was canceled because he has not yet proven his citizenship.
There is not yet any official data on how many eligible Texas voters like Nel were flagged by SAVE but Denton County election director Frank Phillips told NPR that so far out of the 84 flagged registered voters he sent notices to, 14 have proven their citizenship.
The county determined that another 14 people were registered in error because they had indicated on registration forms they were not citizens. The county has canceled their registrations. None had voted.
Fifty-five people in Denton County besides Nel have also had their registration canceled after not responding to the notice, including five people whose notices came back as undeliverable, according to Phillips.
Texas election code instructs officials to cancel a voter's registration if they do not respond to such notices in 30 days or if the mail is returned with no forwarding address.
Nel was surprised voters are removed from the rolls after a single mailed letter, with no other follow up.
"There's no confirmation that someone received the letter," Nel said. "There are probably tons of people out there that have no idea that they're no longer registered to vote."
That concern is shared by voting rights advocates.
Danielle Lang, an attorney with nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, said even if a notice arrives at the voter's address, "They may never open them. Election mail notices and things like that are not a very reliable way of getting voters to engage."
While Nel has a U.S. passport, which he showed to NPR, he worries other naturalized citizens may not have the documents they need on hand to prove citizenship. Without a U.S. passport, Nel would have needed his South African birth certificate and one of his parents' naturalization certificates.
A survey last year commissioned by the University of Maryland's Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and the advocacy group VoteRiders found that in Texas, 7% of adult citizens do not have easy access to citizenship documents. The number went up to 12% for those under 30.
Nel pointed out it takes time for people to get documents once they request them and there are fees. "It's almost like they're adding barriers for these naturalized citizens to maintain their voter registration," he said.
An "unfiltered and unvetted" list of voters
To use SAVE, the Texas secretary of state's office signed an agreement with USCIS that says the state will "institute additional verification" if SAVE does not identify a registered voter as a U.S. citizen, and if the voter still cannot be verified, to contact them to obtain proof of citizenship.
Nelson tasked officials in 177 counties with investigating the flagged voters.
"Even though the data we received from SAVE is considered a strong match, we directed counties to treat them as weak matches in order to ensure that counties conducted their own investigation," Nelson wrote in a November email to Travis County officials. "Such investigations can include notifying the voter and requesting proof of citizenship directly from the voter."
Chris McGinn, the executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said the state did not tell counties what their investigation must entail so the approach has varied by county.
"The state said, 'Here, check these people out. They're potentially noncitizens,' without any real strict guidance on what the process should be or what resources they should use to do the research," McGinn said.
McGinn has been in touch with 112 counties and learned that while some are trying to gather more information, most relied on sending out mailed notices, and the response rates to those notices were low.
He said it appears more than half of the flagged registered voters were inactive and had never voted, and many may have been registered in error when they got a driver's license.
"The biggest takeaway is that the narrative that noncitizens are registered en masse and affecting elections is just false," McGinn said.
Officials in Travis County, where Austin is located, last week wrote a searing public comment about the use of SAVE in Texas, labeling the list of potential noncitizens that the secretary of state gave counties "unfiltered and unvetted" and alleged it was "another bad faith attempt to remove voters from the rolls, including many people who likely previously demonstrated their citizenship in a transaction with the State of Texas."
Travis County officials found a quarter of the voters SAVE flagged in their county had registered to vote at the Department of Public Safety, which issues driver's licenses. Voters who register at DPS are supposed to show proof of citizenship and those documents stay on file, though it is also possible that some of those registrations were in error.
The secretary of state's office did not cross-check SAVE results with DPS records to check for evidence that any of the flagged voters had previously proven their citizenship before sharing the list with counties, according to a statement the office gave the nonprofit news outlet Votebeat. The secretary of state's office did not respond to NPR's request for comment, but DPS officials told Travis County in an email that it was "not involved" in creating the secretary of state's list.
Celia Israel, Travis County's Democratic tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, said she has been asking the secretary of state's office and DPS to help her access DPS records since late October.
"I don't see anything wrong in asking them to do some more research before I burden a voter," Israel told NPR.
Top of mind for Israel is a past episode in 2019 when the secretary of state at the time claimed to have identified 95,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls but the list wound up including a significant number of naturalized citizens.
Israel is worried about the possibility of voter suppression efforts ahead of midterm elections and sees this process with SAVE as a test.
"We're living at a time in which the folks who are running this country are denying election results and using tools like this to tamp down the vote and discourage the vote," Israel said. "We've got a big election coming up next year. So this to me is also a note to how we could deal with this in a larger fashion next year."
A known defect in SAVE
Nel was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, now known as Gqeberha, and immigrated to Texas with his family when he was just 8. He quickly settled into his new life, riding a yellow school bus to school and celebrating holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving. His parents became U.S. citizens when he was a teenager, and he acquired American citizenship, too, since he was a minor with a green card.
"I consider myself more of an American than I do a South African," Nel told NPR. "I have passion for the United States."
But cases like Nel's, of foreign-born children who acquired citizenship from parents who naturalized, are known to stump SAVE.
USCIS' own fact sheet warns that "if an individual with acquired citizenship has not received a Certificate of Citizenship from USCIS (e.g., some foreign-born children of U.S. citizens) or is not designated as a U.S. citizen in [Social Security Administration] records, SAVE may not be able to confirm that individual's U.S. citizenship."
The sheet goes on to say, "In these circumstances, SAVE returns the case to the user agency for review of their information for data entry errors or to seek additional information from the individual."
Furthermore, a Privacy Impact Assessment DHS published at the end of October acknowledges, "due to misspellings of names, transposed numbers or incomplete information, the SAVE program may produce inaccurate results."
The assessment says that SAVE has a multistep review process, but when the system is queried with Social Security numbers — which is what states use to check voter rolls — it "does not allow for a second and third step review."
Voting rights advocates have also raised concerns about the completeness of Social Security Administration's citizenship records and the accuracy of data matches using just the last four digits of a Social Security number.
Nel was frustrated to learn that SAVE is known to not be able to identify U.S. citizens like him, and the only effort to contact him was a single letter.
In his own career in higher education he has set up information systems and said it would never be permissible to put out a product with a known flaw.
"When something doesn't work, we don't release it," Nel said. "We don't allow people to use a system that doesn't work."
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