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.
As an Italian (but think most of EU citizens) who need to show my id card to vote, I don’t really see where is the problem if there is a check if the person could vote or not. I can agree that using the SSN maybe is not the right way but why should people who are not citizes allowed to vote ? For context, in Italy if I have my legal address (residenza) in Milan I cannot vote for the mayor of Rome, and btw, why should I ?
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.
The check in the US is done when you register to vote. Once you are registered, a variety of proofs of ID can be used to vote at your polling location.
Requiring a passport and birth cert or some other strong ID are unnecessary at the actual voting site. The main reason for doing this is to make voting take longer, and be more strenuous, which means that you can have a greater effect on election results by manipulating the number of polling stations for an area.
And why the double check ? It would not be better to just go to the polling station, show your id and then vote ?
(I undestand that it is a simplification, in the US people move way more often that here and this add some other problems)
Considering that if I have no one before me to vote, it take about 30 seconds from the moment I enter the polling station and the moment I am handed the cards to cast the vote I would argue that saying that this way it will take longer is not really true.
And, btw, we do the check of the document against a printed list who containt all the names of the people who can vote at a polling station, splitted between man and women.
Every difficulty you build to try to make harder for your enemy voters to cast their vote is a difficulty you set up also for your voters.
And simply manipulating the number of polling station in a certain area give you nothing: people who want to vote against you will come anyway and you cannot know if they will come before your voters of after and which voters eventually will lose their patience and just go home without casting a vote
It’s not a double check at the polling station. They simply need to confirm that you showed up and voted today, and have a way to ID you. The actual check, that you are legally allowed to vote, and that you are actually who you say you are, and that you aren’t allowed to vote anywhere else, all happened when you register to vote. That is a long process, and that’s why it is done before you actually need to go vote.
Elections are run by the individual states (unless something egregiously unconstitutional is going on) which allows the governor and even local election officials to make decisions that affect how hard it is to vote almost down to a street level basis. If you don’t want people from blue areas to vote, you just put in fewer polling stations, and make them in less convenient places for areas that skew blue on the map. So adding 30 seconds to the voting time doesn’t really matter for a rural station that might need to service 100 people in a day, but for an inner city location that might need to service 100 people a minute those 30 seconds per person really add up.