The SAVE system isn’t reliable, but it might be useful. One Arizona county’s experience shows how.

Filed 7h ago · Via Arizona Mirror · The Buffoon Desk

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Fluffing a Duck

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: The White House · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Yavapai County Recorder Michelle Burchill ran her Arizona county's voter rolls through DHS's SAVE system, a tool retooled under Trump's 2025 executive order to hunt for noncitizen voters nationwide. After months of cross-checking against other databases, she found 30 noncitizens — about 0.01 percent of the county's voters — while also using the system to confirm citizenship for voters lacking required documents and to flag dead registrants.

Elsewhere the tool has performed far less carefully: Missouri wrongly flagged hundreds of voters without verification, Texas flagged over 2,000 with some later confirmed as citizens, and Maricopa County's recorder moved to change flagged voters' registration status without answering questions about his vetting process. DHS reported 24,000 flags nationwide out of 60 million records checked, a rate that officials elsewhere took at face value rather than double-checking as Burchill did.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A tool built to check public-benefits eligibility got repurposed into a national noncitizen dragnet, and the one place it worked reasonably well is the one place that treated its output as a lead rather than a verdict. Everywhere else, officials seem to have preferred the scarier unverified number to the boring, checked one.

Source: Read the original at Arizona Mirror → Scored: Fluffing a Duck · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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