Saving us from ourselves

The United States Constitution plainly states that election of federal officials is conducted by the individual states and that the methods they use must be the same as the ones used to elect members of the state legislatures. The lists of registered voters are created, maintained by, and are the property of the states. 

President Trump wants to change that and “nationalize” the elections. He claims that there is widespread voting in federal elections by people who are not U.S. citizens. To that effect, he has had the Department of Justice demand complete voter file lists from the states. The publicized reason for giving our private data to the feds is to prohibit non-citizens from voting.

But non-citizen voting is very rare according to a review by the Bipartisan Policy Center. They state: 

“Utah performed a citizenship review of its entire voter registration list from April 2025 through January 2026. After a time-intensive, multi-step review of more than 2 million registered voters, they identified only one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting.”

“Georgia: In October 2024, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that a citizenship audit of 8.2 million registered voters identified 20 noncitizens who had registered to vote. Of those 20 individuals, just nine had cast ballots in prior elections, most before Georgia implemented enhanced citizenship verification….”

The Department of Justice has demanded that the states submit their complete voter files, which include driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers to the Justice department. The department will then run the data through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) which is administered by the Department of Homeland Security and is used by states and federal agencies to check the eligibility of applicants for government programs. This will allow the feds to notify the states which voters are not U. S. citizens. 

The Justice department may then purge the voter files of “suspect” voters, clearly violating states’ rights. (Many state and federal agencies are forbidden from sharing personal information with each other, including the information the Justice deparment is requesting.)

Now, anytime a political leader comes up with an idea to make voting safer, easier, harder, or foolproof, you name it, you can bet your boots that it will benefit the political party of the person whose idea it is. You have that motive in President Biden’s Freedom to Vote Act of 2022 and we now have President Trump’s Safeguard America’s Voter Eligibility (SAVE) legislation before the Senate this week.

Laws in all states prohibit non-citizens from voting (except in a few scattered municipal and school board election districts). When registering to vote we are asked to swear, under penalty of perjury, that we are U. S. citizens. The SAVE Act would increase federal involvement in state elections. It would require new registrants to offer proof that they are U.S. citizens, such as a passport (at $130 a pop) or registered copy of a birth certificate or ditto a marriage certificate. Keep in mind that you have to re-register any time you move to a different state or within a state. It won’t be cheap.

Montana is one of the 22 states that has complied — sort of — with the Department of Justice order. However, it is unclear if Montana has sent Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers because the Secretary of State’s office has not responded to two legislative committees’ requests for that information. But the Secretary of State’s Office did say that the feds had found a total of 23 suspect registrations (out of over 780,000 statewide) that may be illegal. Naturally, county elections officials would like to know who those people are, but the Secretary of State’s Office is not telling them either.

I have never been a fan of the federal government having access to my, or anyone else’s, personal information and for a part of my life the federal government seemed to agree. My first Social Security card (1961) gave plain notice that it was “not to be used for the purpose of identification”. Well, those days are long gone, and we happily give our private data to online retailers who just as happily sell it to the highest bidder, including the federal government.

What Montanans have to decide for themselves is this; is it worth giving the federal government information about yourself in order to prevent a maximum of 23 people from voting in Montana elections?

Jim Elliott served sixteen years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.