Yet another Hacker News

Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks

29 points speckx 42 minutes ago 20 comments

genxy 22 minutes ago | parent

Who is the editor on this article? Why would they expect the reader to know what the SAVE database is and what its original purpose was for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...

> Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is a program managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SAVE was created in 1986 and facilitates lookups on the immigration and nationality status of individuals in the United States.

The wikipedia article is written ambiguously, or they bury the actual purpose of the SAVE database

> a system for verifying the immigration status of non-citizen applicants applying for (medicad, food stamps, unemployment, student loans and housing assistance)

It wasn't designed to be a citizenship database.

https://apnews.com/article/save-database-noncitizen-voters-t...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-save-system...

ck2 22 minutes ago | parent

hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1

remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all

if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028

of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override

sejje 13 minutes ago | parent

> find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases

They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.

snakeboy 5 minutes ago | parent

Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.

So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.

m463 22 minutes ago | parent

I was wondering what this was.

SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...

delichon 17 minutes ago | parent

  You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. -- Milton Friedman

Turns out you can, but for how long?

goatlover 15 minutes ago | parent

As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.

rattlesnakedave 7 minutes ago | parent

You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.

Muromec 13 minutes ago | parent

For as long as you make it possible and attractive for new immigrants to join the this Ponzi schemw

rattlesnakedave 8 minutes ago | parent

Calling the welfare state a Ponzi scheme doesn’t magically make every new entrant a net contributor.

goatlover 20 minutes ago | parent

Why do the courts even entertain this administration's requests when Trump has made it clear he wants to unconstitutionally take some form of control over state elections because he doesn't want Democrats to retake control of Congress?

The only conclusion seems to be that conservative majorities on SCOTUS and the Eighth Circuit want this to happen as part of their unitary executive theory.

An even more cynical conclusion is that they want the next two elections to be tampered with in favor of the Republican Party, so they remainin in control of the Federal government.

sejje 15 minutes ago | parent

Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections is what Democrats need to retake control of Congress?

Which is the unconstitutional part?

coin 8 minutes ago | parent

The States decide who they send to Congress to represent them. The Federal government has no right to interfere in how the States makes this determination.

> Do you mean that foreign nationals voting in American elections

In minuscule insignificant amounts. See The Heritage Foundation's own findings.

tasty_freeze 12 minutes ago | parent

The Supreme Court ruled that it is 100% constitutional for states to disenfranchise voters based on party affiliation. I am not constitutional expert so I'll take them at their word that this is indeed the case.

So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.

Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.

kccqzy 12 minutes ago | parent

Wow I haven’t heard of the SAVE database at all before today, despite knowing about e-verify and SEVIS and similar programs. Reading Wikipedia there’s also VIS and PCQS, two more systems I haven’t heard of. It seems that the country’s distaste for a national ID not only forces each state to issue IDs but also the federal government to create a patchwork of slightly different ID programs.