Technology

They were against the Beast because they didn't know they'd agree with his policies.

Citizenship is already required to vote in state [...] elections.

This is incorrect. The law you think you're referencing by this is only applicable to Federal positions. Several states explicitly allow non-citizen voting in local elections. Many have no laws on the books at all addressing it. Only 15 states explicitly prohibit non-citizen voting for local positions.

https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_permitting_noncitizens_to_vote_in_the_United_States

This fact alone should mandate that the federal level maintains their own registrations. The State and Federal levels have different applicable voter rolls because the state doesn't have the same requirements as the federal elections.

Edit: Wrong word.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with this proposal, however, if we know one thing about this regime, it's that they will use anything as a political tool for their advantage. So, it's very likely that Trump uses this project as an avenue to revoke the citizenship of his perceived political enemies. It's probably a good idea to get a passport issued before this gets started so it's at least a little bit harder for them to claim you aren't a citizen.

You should absolutely see something wrong. This is solving a problem that doesn't exist, which means it's actually trying to solve a different "problem", namely that minorities get to vote.

My money's on it

no no, it's an input to a Palantir database

You already can’t vote if you’re not a citizen. There are voter rolls and you get checked off when you go vote.

This almost certainly will be used to deport people without going through due process.

I think in most cases where this administration seems to have a good idea it's important to remember that it's likely designed to keep them in power.

A national database that the trump admin controls will 100% be exploited for their own gain, just like every other aspect of government is being exploited for their gain now.

What happens if someone is illegitimately removed from this database? How can you show whether it was a glitch, or deliberate? How do you know if the information they have about you is even right, or get it changed if you need to? Where's the accountability?

See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide. The government and the software company both knew about the bug causing the issue, too, but prosecutions continued. "If the computer says it, it must be right", sort of danger.

Because they want to use the data for more nefarious purposes to displace non-white American voters.

The US is generally the same where some local elections allow non-citizen residents to vote for local issues.

The issue with this is was not created publicly. We don't know what kind of data is being uses to determine someone's status. If someone is private enough to not have any data collected by its source, then they could be denied voting rights despite being legally able to vote.

It also could end up bring used as the sole source for verifying someone's status, despite having documents to prove otherwise.

It's not a problem. It's fair to assume anything the Trump administration does is nefarious.

Don't make the mistake of thinking this is a legitimate implementation of such a system. It will absolutely be intentionally flawed in ways that allow the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans citizens. That's 100% what always happens with Republican initiatives to "protect" elections. It will be made trivial to "accidentally" remove legitimate voter registrations, and a labyrinthian bureaucratic process to correct them.

I'm fairly sure we already do, but they are administered state by state, and not centralized.

So, states already have their list of registered voters, this is about culling people from that list the state doesn't think should really be there (but really specifically those supporting the opposition of the party in power, typically Republicans removing minority groups).

The reason removing people is a real thing that needs to happen is that people aren't permanent citizens of a state, they're just residents, and what state they are a resident of for voting purposes is extremely easy to change, and doesn't really require notifying the state you're leaving, just the one you now want to be a resident of.

The reason this specific thing is bullshit is that every time anyone does any kind of check for non-citizens voting, it's basically non-existent. Instead, they're going to use the pretense of checking citizenship to check other information, which they'll selectively find other discrepancies in to remove people who are registered, but are likely to support their opposition. Likely with little time before an election, so hopefully they don't find out until it's too late or other frictions cause them to forgo voting voluntarily.