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

Given that only 22 noncitizens over the course of like 10 years (can't remember the exact statistic) tried to vote, the way to get the best accuracy would be to just hard code the answer to "yes, they can vote". Then you get over 99.99% accuracy.

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

    From the article:

    At least seven states with a total of about 35 million registered voters have publicly reported the results of running their voter rolls through the system. Those searches have identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01% of registered voters — as noncitizens. This aligns with previous findings that noncitizens rarely register to vote.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago*

    I'm not even sure what incentive they would have. We already have a huge problem with citizens not voting because they think their vote won't change anything. Is anyone going to think "I'm going to risk going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for me to spend my free time filling out a ballot box which will have a 0.000001% chance of having any effect"?

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