DHS Not Helping Remove Noncitizens From Voter Rolls, Florida Elections Official Says

Secretary of State Cord Byrd said in an interview with the Washington Examiner Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration database would be the best tool it uses to verify the citizenship status of registered voters — if it were reliable.

Byrd, who was appointed to his post by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in 2022, said Florida is one of the few states that uses the DHS dataset, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, to see whether immigrants have been naturalized.

The database was originally intended for federal and state governments to check whether a person was eligible for certain public benefits, but Florida was among the first states to begin using it about a decade ago to verify voter eligibility.

However, Byrd said, querying the database is expensive and can take weeks. He added that DHS also does not keep the most up-to-date information on people who naturalize, even though tens of thousands of Floridians become citizens each year.

“It’s not properly updated,” Byrd said. “It’s expensive, and we have to have the alien registration number for it to give us a positive result, and a lot of times we get proof that someone is a noncitizen, but they don’t have the alien registration number, so even when we can use (the database), we can’t because states don’t always have that information.”

Since May, when he first testified before Congress on the issue, Byrd has implored DHS to proactively provide states with updated lists of who has naturalized, but the federal government refuses, he said.

“It’s the only tool we have,” Byrd said. “They’ve been pretty much silent, as far as the Biden administration is concerned. They’re not cooperative. They’re not helping us.”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Maintaining electoral rolls, that is, keeping a list of voters who are registered and eligible to vote, is a legal responsibility of secretaries of state.

Through this process, some states, including Texas, Virginia and Ohio, have discovered hundreds or thousands of noncitizens on their voter rolls in recent years, even though noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections. Byrd said that over the past month, his office has flagged dozens of registered voters each week who may be noncitizens, so that counties can review and remove them from the rolls, if necessary.

In Florida, the vast majority of voters register to vote when they get a driver’s license or other identification card from the state government. That eliminates most noncitizens, Byrd said, because Floridians must provide information about their citizenship to the state agency at that time. If they are noncitizens, they cannot continue with their voter registration.

However, if a person registers to vote outside of this process, the applicant must simply check a box regarding their citizenship status on a form and sign it, swearing that it is true. Federal law prohibits states from requesting documents proving citizenship during this process.

Republicans in Congress have pushed hard for legislation that would require voter registration applicants to provide proof of citizenship with their applications, but Democrats have rejected the move as unnecessary.

In the meantime, secretaries of state must rely on various other state-level tools, such as jury selection reports and driver’s license data, to verify the citizenship status of registered voters. In Florida, if election officials identify a potential noncitizen, that person is given due process before they can be removed from the voter rolls.

Better access to DHS’s SAVE data would make the entire citizenship verification process more efficient, Byrd said.

“We need DHS because only the federal government naturalizes its citizens,” Byrd said. “They know every person they naturalize.”

Despite the cases of non-citizens appearing on voter rolls, studies and data from the conservative Heritage Foundation, the Justice Department, and think tanks like the CATO Institute have all shown that it is extremely rare for non-citizens to vote.

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According to Byrd, this year, among the approximately 13.5 million registered voters, Florida authorities have arrested two people for voting as noncitizens. Florida authorities uncover potential prosecutions during their routine voter registration checks when they find that a potential noncitizen may have voted at some point, Byrd said.

Democrats have pointed to the scarcity of noncitizen votes to argue that the problem is not worth addressing and would only lead to disenfranchisement. Republicans, meanwhile, argue that strengthening states’ ability to screen citizens would help boost voter confidence in election security.