The Homefront Report: The Database Has Questions About Your Citizenship

The Supreme Court lets expanded voter checks resume during an appeal, while Oregon says it won’t participate.

On Friday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to resume using an expanded federal database to check voter citizenship while a lawsuit over the program continues. States can choose whether to send voter information to the system, and Oregon’s secretary of state has already said we will not. That is reassuring for Oregon voters, but it leaves a question for eligible voters elsewhere: What happens when the government’s record of who you are is wrong?

The system, called SAVE, now draws on Social Security records and permits election officials to check groups of names at once. In its order, the Court acknowledged the case of a naturalized citizen whose Social Security record does not accurately reflect her citizenship. A state using the system could require someone in her position to produce more proof before she can register or remain registered. The Court has allowed the expanded program to operate during the appeal; it hasn’t issued a final decision resolving the lawsuit. I spent years working in healthcare quality and compliance, and one lesson followed me home: a record is only as reliable as the process for correcting it. If the computer gets your life wrong, handing you a form is a response, but it is hardly the whole answer when your vote depends on what happens next.

At our house last night, the consequences of something being in the wrong place were considerably less grave and much funnier, at least from where I was standing. Ezra had become fascinated with our Bluetooth speaker while we listened to music, so my husband put it on the floor for him. Somehow it migrated into a corner beneath the edge of a hanging blanket, just far enough out of sight that my husband’s brain continued along its usual route while his foot encountered a suspiciously placed speaker.

He stubbed his toe, and I laughed hysterically, demonstrating the kind of spousal compassion that may need to be reviewed by a committee. He was fine, and the sheer ridiculousness of it caught me at exactly the right moment. I have spent so much of this week thinking about frightening things that I was grateful for a little slapstick comedy staged by a one-year-old and an appliance with poor situational awareness.

The voter database is a more serious version of a familiar problem: information can sit out of sight, incomplete or out of date, until somebody runs into it. The Court’s majority concluded that the federal government is likely to prevail on its argument that a 1996 law permits the information sharing behind the expanded system. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, disagreed and warned that outdated citizenship records could burden lawful voters. Those are the competing views at this stage of the case, with the appeal still ahead.

There is also an important limit on what Friday’s ruling does. Federal law restricts systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, and the Court said that limit reduces the ruling’s immediate effect. Individual inquiries can still occur.

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read says our state will not participate, and that Friday’s ruling will have no impact on Oregon’s upcoming election. I’m glad he said so plainly. People have enough to do in the weeks before an election without wondering whether a federal database has developed an outdated opinion about their citizenship.

Today, our own schedule has a much happier recurring entry: cheesecake. A retired school bus driver bakes mini cheesecakes and sells them from a little red cart beside the road, and they are the best I have ever tasted. My husband loves cheesecake, the kids love it, and Ezra has apparently decided that being one year old entitles him to strong views on dessert. There is something lovely about the woman who spent years getting children where they needed to go now making something wonderful for people who happen to stop.

My husband will be helping his grandmother move furniture today, because when someone needs him, he shows up. The kids and I will soldier on without him and perhaps accomplish something around the house, although I am leaving the definition of “something” open until I see how the day goes.

We may finally have a workable approach to the coating on our floors that we believe is contributing to the lead problem. We tested a small patch with chemical stripper, and it came off beautifully. That gives us a way to explore removing it without filling the house with the dust sanding could create, although a successful patch is only a start; the work, cleanup, and testing still have to keep Ezra safe. Buying enough stripper for all the floors is going to look like one enormous dollar sign, but this is for our baby, so we will keep figuring it out. We are learning how expensive it can be to correct a problem even after you know where to look. That is part of why I have little patience for a government system that treats the person caught in its error as the last step of quality control.

There is another test of who gets to correct the record in Washington today. A federal judge temporarily ordered the White House to restore access for journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico after their credentials were revoked. Yet for the president’s Saturday trip on Air Force One, White House guidance left CNN off its scheduled turn providing video coverage for the television press pool and listed Real America’s Voice instead. The judge’s order addressed access to White House grounds and did not expressly decide who travels on the plane. The result is that a reporter can have a restored credential while the fight over independent coverage continues somewhere else.

In healthcare, the administration announced this week that CMS had canceled roughly 315,000 Marketplace enrollments covering more than 760,000 people back on August 31. CMS says it and insurers confirmed the enrollments were unauthorized, and the agency expects to recover about $2.2 billion in subsidy payments. Unauthorized enrollment is a real problem for the people whose information was used without permission. It would be a mistake to describe those 760,000 people as having committed fraud; CMS is also targeting agent and broker conduct and introducing stronger consumer authorization rules.

I want systems that catch that kind of abuse, just as I want accurate voter rolls and honest information from the White House. I also want the people operating those systems to explain their decisions, correct mistakes promptly, and remember that the entries on a screen belong to actual people with elections to participate in, doctors to see, and lives already full of things that need doing.

A life is made of moments so small they can seem disposable until they accumulate: my husband moving furniture for his grandmother, a woman selling cheesecake from her red cart, Ezra enjoying music, and me laughing far too hard when his father discovers where the speaker went. Those moments deserve room to continue, which is why the larger fights matter even on a Saturday when I would much rather be discussing dessert. A citizen’s vote and the public’s view of its government should not depend on whether the people in charge find accountability convenient.

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The test patch on our floors gave us a promising way forward, and now we’re figuring out how to afford enough supplies to do the rest carefully for Ezra. Your kindness helps us through the expensive, unglamorous work of making our home safer, with room for a little Saturday cheesecake along the way. Thank you for caring about the life behind these reports.