1. United States
2. Ariz.
3. Letter

The president has been threatening, cajoling, suing, appealing, and demanding that states use his SAVE database to identify “ineligible noncitizens” who may be voting in elections. Here in Maricopa County, the SAVE database identified 60 Arizonans as ineligible, and our county attorney followed up on each of those flagged individuals. Only six of those sixty people were actually ineligible to vote. The remaining 54 flagged voters were eligible, qualified voters whose ballots were placed in jeopardy by this wildly flawed tool. It is inexcusable for the federal government to waste taxpayer funds, state resources, and local attorneys’ time with this fundamentally flawed database that would be stripping Americans of their constitutional right to vote without the efforts of our local authorities proving to the Trump administration that they are targeting 54 of our citizen-neighbors for exclusion from the polls in this election. There is no reason to use a tool that has so high a false-positive rate unless the goal is to strip eligible voters of their civil right to vote. Tell the president: the SAVE database is too flawed to function and you need every eligible Arizona voter’s vote to count. Congress must legislate against use of the SAVE database to restrict access to the ballot box.