According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks.
The group says those lapses put the Social Security information of more than 300 million Americans at risk.
I agree with you in principal, verifying your identity before voting is important because elections are important. We should be having a conversation about creating a system that is both comprehensive and also doesn’t impose a burden on people without means. For example, a lot of people don’t have an ID to satisfy the proposed requirements and would have a difficult time getting these credentials before election day.
In addition, in order to get these documents a person would have to jump through a lot of bureaucratic loopholes and pay fees. Many of these people are poorer and are more affected by the dire economic situation. The systems are complicated and despite being involved in this sphere for a few years I couldn’t tell you the steps and fees required to get all of the documents. This isn’t a simple system where a person can just walk into a government office and walk out with a working ID.
If we’re going to have a system requiring Secure IDs (I’m not sure the EU analog, but you guys have a similar secure identity scheme being pushed) then we need to make getting Secure IDs dead simple because the average citizen needs to be able to vote and also shouldn’t be subjected to heavy administrative burden in order to participate in the democratic system.
In this case, this isn’t even about showing an ID. There is an electronic system being created by the DHS, at the whim of Donald Trump, which is implementing a project that is not authorized or funded by laws passed by Congress (so, its already an illegal expenditure of funds). This project is intended to be given to the States so that on election day a person’s information can be entered into the system and the system will say if they are a valid citizen or not. If the system says that they are not a citizen, then they cannot vote.
One of the, many, many, problems with this system is that we have no idea how it works internally. The proposal is to allow a black box system that is controlled entirely by Donald Trump be responsible for determining who is and isn’t allowed to vote. Any errors of this system that occur on election day and disqualify people from voting will result in people being unable to vote and also unable to meaningfully challenge their disqualification in court (because they have until midnight to vote and no courts work that fast).
Even if you trusted Donald Trump to fairly and impartially administer elections (and if you do then you are probably a crazy person in the thrall of the US alt-right propaganda campaign), the system has objectively failed on simple tests and has rejected actual US Citizens. We have no idea how this system works and why it is rejecting US Citizen.
On top of all of that. The entire premise that this system was created to solve was the idea that the outcome of US elections have been altered by non-citizens voting. There is no evidence that non-citizens are voting and the actual cases of voter fraud that are brought by State and Federal law enforcement are nowhere close to the scale required to actually change election outcomes (there may be 100-200 election fraud cases across the entire US in any given election year).
So, it’s a system which unilaterally gets to determine who can vote. It exists to solve a problem that isn’t happening, it is not authorized by law, and is controlled by a person who has shown both the intention and immorality to subvert democratic outcomes up to and including using mob violence, witness intimidation and political pressure against his enemies.
You’re right that having secure, fair and free elections are important. In my opinion, this system doesn’t solve any problems and exists completely to allow for Donald Trump to disqualify people at scale using external data which allows for them to determine which way a person is likely to vote. We don’t know how the system works and it could be as simple as If Democrat Voter -> Disqualify 30% of the time.
It’s illegal, created for criminal purposes and will likely be an exhibit in the Conspiracy Against Rights/Treason cases against Trump, his minions and his financial backers once they’re swept from power in the midterms and then impeached and removed from office.