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“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes: SAVE tool keeps mistakenly flagging voters as noncitizens (www.propublica.org)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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  • Widespread Errors: An expanded federal tool for identifying noncitizens on voter rolls is making persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing citizenship for people born outside the U.S.
  • Banned From Voting: In Missouri, state officials told local clerks to temporarily ban flagged voters from casting ballots, even though hundreds turned out to be citizens.
  • Texas Confusion: As errors emerged in SAVE data, local clerks said the state hadn’t provided them with clear guidance and worried about disenfranchising eligible citizens.
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[–] 7 points 8 months ago (14 children)

What do you want Americans to do? Start an open insurrection? Do you really realize how many thousand of people would die the instant a semi-armed civilian led force tried to fight back?

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    It's a case of die standing up or on your knees in a 'big beautiful' concentration camp. A peaceful general strike and spending boycott would be a start, but nobody seems to be willing to make that sacrifice until it's too late.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    What do you mean by spending boycott, if your thinking about the corporations that are enabling this administration I can agree on sentiment but not on effectiveness, the involved corporations are already propped up by nonexistent money, removing the real money won't have any noticeable effects other than accelerating the economic collapse, which I will grant you is not necessarily a bad play, but it is not quite as cut and dry.

    If you are talking about tax evasion, I would highly doubt that that would end well, especially with the propaganda machine in full swing

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (9 children)

    I'm genuinely losing my mind at this take. For the last 13 months we've seen thousands of human people walked to their death -- watched planes of human beings take off and return empty; and still half of the comments I see that suggest taking action beyond peaceful marches and waiting for the 2026 midterms get this "smarter than thou" smug response from people, some claiming to be 50501 liberals. Sometimes it's, like, 15 lines and a song quote; with the occasional ALL CAPS "DO NOT TAKE THE BAIT".

    People are dying, folks; now. Come to reality. A clash with ICE, especially in the first months when they were untrained and barely armed, wouldn't have accelerated anything--because we didn't have that and yet we are here. This mythical "Insurrection Act" invocation wouldn't have caused the terrorism we are witnessing now; nor the deployments in LA or Portland. Yes, people will die in clashes with the state; but what's the alternative? Letting people die in raids from the state? We watched camera footage with video of pro-Palestinian activists getting disappeared. We've seen masked agents killing hundreds of people across the states, every month. We've seen them raid neighborhoods, and pull people into vans. We've seen our police watch, do nothing, then arrest the bystanders for "causing a disturbance". Every. Day.

    The part of me that is clinging onto some partial hope in human nature wants to blame this widespread passivity propaganda for the reason it took a year to have the resistance effort in Minneapolis, which there had been nothing like until that point. Really, though, I sense the real reason behind these arguments and the wider inaction, is that the targets of ICE have been predominantly people of color, and mainly Hispanic folks. So, too, were the kids in cages through the first Trump and Biden administrations.

    I understand that Holocaust poem in a depth that I just didn't understand before. I understand the Holocaust documentaries and testimonies I've watched in a depth I hadn't gotten before.

    You aren't outsmarting the Republicans by standing back as they kill thousands; tens-of-thousands; hundreds-of-thousands of people of color. You're giving them exactly what they wanted: A “second American Revolution”; [white]-bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    If you think things are already as bad as they can get, then you lack perspective.

    There's still a chance of electoral victory. Progressives across the country are having punishing victories. Don't throw away that momentum by being too trigger-happy. People are waking up, don't put them back to sleep.

    If the republicans rig or steal the election (which they certainly intend to, but it's not yet certain how successful they'll be), then all gloves are off and the third and fifth sentences of the Declaration of Independence kicks in.

    Until that point, the fourth sentence still applies.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    It always could get worse. That doesn't change how bad they are now; nor that they're steadily getting worse.

    In the event Republicans do steal that election, then what? How do we decide that happened? If the elections are delayed a month, is that the cue? What about three months? What about two years? What if the new election will happen next month? Do we still declare the election stolen? What if Republicans keep all the seats they have in the House and Senate, and gain 20 more in the House. Is that rigged because Democrats "should have" won? By what logic?

    We're seeing an administration united on brutalizing people and mangling our democracy, brutalize people and mangle our democracy. Maybe 2026 will be the year progressives sweep the House—Maybe—; but after 9 years watching my country continue to push the bar on how bad things can get, while constantly being told that there was going to be a progressive blue wave resurgence—and seeing people say the same throughout Reagan, Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, Trump-1, Biden, Trump-2...

    I feel we're being played here. Are we not just being strung along? All I've heard is this messaging to wait just a bit longer and then watching everything get worse as people sit idle.

    I just find it awfully suspicious how the winning plan to defeat this Corporate/White supremacist/Christofascist regime is to keep everything calm so the corporations can keep earning; while the white supremacists and Christofascists keep killing and maiming thousands of people of color and others they've branded "undesirables". Where is this messaging coming from? It's being echoed all around, but what is the source? It feels like we're being gaslit here, or led by yet another naive voice telling us to "stop overreacting".

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

    You aren't outsmarting the Republicans by standing back as they kill thousands; tens-of-thousands; hundreds-of-thousands of people of color. You're giving them exactly what they wanted: A “second American Revolution”; [white]-bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

    Nor would blindly killing the Repubs/Nazis. All it will do is start a massive killing frenzy. A killing frenzy the government wants and is trying to provoke

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    As I said in my comment, the killing frenzy is here. This government has become more emboldened than ever in oppressing and brutalizing us citizens because they've been taking slow steps toward fascism for decades. The War on Drugs; Bush v. Gore; The Patriot Act; the reporters of Ferguson; Trump's first term executive order overreach; the fucking Insurrection—This year: DOGE; ICE; CECOT; Tariff War; Plus we're just now seeing everything in the Epstein files which was happening as well for decades.

    Decades of peaceful protesting and it hasn't worked. We've only been losing ground. 2015's gay marriage decision was a fluke; and the Affordable Care Act was more of a duct-tape fix than true reform.

    We've had two real assassinations in the USA: Brian Thompson in December 2024, and Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Do you think the government wanted either of those? Judging from the bipartisan condemnation, absolutely not. Folks like me are not saying to mow down a red state neighborhood. We're saying to resist the ICE deployments, physically, when they show up.

    You're right that the US government wants a killing frenzy. It's the one they are enacting, every day of the majority of this term. Even if Republicans' intent in disappearing these tens-of-thousands, maybe hundreds-of-thousands of people is to bait a reaction from people, what is the alternative? We... let tens of thousands of human beings get disappeared? The dehumanization of these victims is sickening and yet it continues to be perpetuated by "holier than thou" liberals who either don't realize what they're suggesting, or don't care.

    So, let's say no one does anything in retaliation. Why wouldn't they just make shit up? Well.. the answer is, they have. We've got Stephen Miller on FOX ranting about how blue cities were littered with "body after body after body" under Biden; talking about how Portland would burn to the ground every night. It's all lies. They lie. We know they lie. Their biggest ally, big tech, spent billions of dollars over the last several years making machines that fake evidence and gaslight people. The White house has used AI-generated images and videos to humiliate activists and produce propaganda.

    IF we ever claw back our nation from fascism, and that is a big IF, scholars will ask why no one did anything—how this could happen with the open internet, a tool believed to be able to mitigate and prevent the rise of fascism. This constant fearmongering about the "Insurrection Act" and insistence to not react is a significant part of that answer, and I will preach that to the grave.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I think many people are aware of this, but what do you DO. There are laws and expectations of civilized society. On both sides. You become the first person to raise some form of resistance I highly doubt the majority will welcome you with open arms. No, likely you will be seen by everyone as a cult leader, an anarchist, or at best, someone who snapped and refused to follow the rules of society.

    The real people who need to take action are elected officials. Mayors and governors need to stand up and say "my people will not be used for this, and you cannot force us." The fact that yhese events that you are very aware of were able to happen were entirely due to the lack of responsible leadership, not that some people didnt grab their handgun and form a resistance group of 20 people to fight a fully armed surveillance police state.

    I agree with you, its awful, I dont want to sit back and let things happen but what, realistically in modern society, do you do.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Understanding that we don't have that elected leadership, do we just let people die en-masse? If our mayors and governors stood up and said they refuse to comply with federal orders, then what? The national guard was federalized in LA, and we saw troops shoot reporters and peaceful citizens in LA and Minneapolis.

    Obviously there are no easy answers here. That ship sailed when Donald Trump won re-election. If your answer is "we sit back and wait for something to save us" then that's your answer. Seeing the ongoing mass-murder by ICE, border patrol, and the rest of the bipartisan-founded Republican-led terrorists; that answer doesn't sit right with me.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Again, I totally agree and think you're right. I don't want to sit back, but no one has a realistic answer. They have nice answers that they hope someone does, but we dont have a unified voice saying this is what we are doing.

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