5

The discussion on a related question made me wonder. Let's say the US decides that starting tomorrow they want to verify the citizenship status of every single voter. Is there a central database they could use to do so?

I'm aware that the US doesn't have a national ID card and that not everyone owns a passport, but at the same time the American government is well known for collecting vast amounts of data about everyone and everywhere, so I'd be surprised if they couldn't keep track of their own citizens.

Rick Smith
  • 35,501
  • 5
  • 100
  • 160
JonathanReez
  • 50,757
  • 35
  • 237
  • 435
  • 10
    Yes. It's called Facebook. – default locale Mar 27 '18 at 12:26
  • Not store bought dirt's answer is correct: there is no such database. But the federal government would not verify citizenship; this would fall to the states. If such a requirement were imposed, therefore, states would come up with their own solutions. Most likely, they would enhance existing voter databases to include data describing how a voter's citizenship was verified, which would take place the old fashioned way, by examining documents, just as happens when people apply for passports. – phoog Mar 28 '18 at 15:02

3 Answers3

4

On a federal level, effectively, it's a Social Security database + possibly IRS database that uses SSN/TPID as key.

  1. The only way a citizen is close to 100% likely (h/t to to @notstoreboughtdirt, it's not required) to register with a Federal government, is to obtain a Social Security Number at birth. (they also file a Birth Certificate but that's only with local authorities and I'm unaware whether there's an official Federal database harvesting that data).

    I'm not sure if it's required to be in IRS database if you have no income of your own and nobody claims you as a dependent. But let's assume it is until I'm proven otherwise.

    This combo of SSN and IRS database is the best, and only, dataset that could be used. And, theoretically, it's not 100% immune to Type 1 error (there's a - likely small but non-zero - number of off the grid people who are citizens but would be flagged as non-citizens due to not being in either SSN or IRS database).

  2. In theory, a citizen can escape being in any other official Federal databases aside from that (I'll leave my tin foil hat on Skeptics and not mention DHS databases, as they presumably aren't legally accessible for the purposes of election registration even if they have enough data).

  3. The following are 100% excluded from being comprehensive: census data (I have never been in a census in my entire life since coming to USA, and census data doesn't have SSN or any other meaningful personal ID). Birth records (they are local, and have no official Federal level registry), and aren't public data so there's no commercial product aggregating that. Educational data is local.

    Many if not most other databases are statistical sampling and don't have every citizen - e.g. BLS, Commerce department, etc...

    Credit rating agencies only cover data once someone enters the economy as a consumer, so you don't know if a person was born in USA, merely when they started a credit history in USA.

  4. As a side note: DHS/INS data only has legal immigrants (so excludes many if not most illegals). However, it can be easily used to distinguish citizens from legal immigrants.

user4012
  • 92,336
  • 19
  • 225
  • 386
  • I've heard somewhere that you don't have to be registered with the SSA. But so many things require a SSN that you'd be hamstringing yourself if you refused to get one. – cHao Mar 27 '18 at 13:26
  • you don't have to get a ssn at birth. https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10023.pdf –  Mar 27 '18 at 15:53
  • @notstoreboughtdirt - good point! – user4012 Mar 27 '18 at 16:10
  • Does the social security database record people's nationality? Does it track changes in people's nationality? I suspect that the answer to both is no, though my suspicion about the first is weaker. In any event, both the SSA and the IRS will have records of hundreds of thousands of noncitizens. – phoog Mar 28 '18 at 14:05
  • 1
    Further thoughts: (1) I doubt the IRS has citizenship information in its files. (2) US citizens living abroad are far more likely not to be in either the SSA or IRS databases, especially if they've never lived in the US; many do not file tax returns even though they're generally supposed to. Many of those people will be unable to register to vote, however; some states allow people who've never lived in the US to register based on a parent's former domicile in that state, but not all do. – phoog Mar 28 '18 at 14:42
  • How many censuses have you avoided? How did you do it? – phoog Oct 31 '19 at 14:47
3

No.

You are not required to tell anyone you had a child. If you are part of an offgrid church it is theoretically possible you can get to voting age without any interaction with any US government, but to be provably a citizen.

  • The document you link to doesn't seem to cover the case where a US citizen's child is not a US citizen, which is surely uncommon, but possible. – phoog Mar 28 '18 at 14:10
  • I was unaware that could happen, and would be interested in how that works. –  Mar 28 '18 at 14:29
  • 1
    In short, a child born outside the US to a US citizen parent or parents only acquires US citizenship if at least one US citizen parent has had adequate physical presence inside the US before the child's birth (the details have changed over the years and at times depended on the parent's sex; I'm not sure whether it currently does). Another possibility could be adoption; I don't know how that works. – phoog Mar 28 '18 at 14:39
  • [http://immigration.findlaw.com/citizenship/u-s-citizenship-for-a-foreign-born-adopted-child.html] rather complex. While a child may actually be a citizen, if that child needs or requires proof, there is an application process. – BobE Mar 30 '18 at 22:34
  • [http://immigration.findlaw.com/citizenship/u-s-citizenship-for-a-foreign-born-adopted-child.html] rather complex. While a child may actually be a citizen, if that child needs or requires proof, there is an application process. Which, when you think of it, is not much different than born in the US - that is you may need to apply for certification. and the application fee isn't cheap. (analogous to poll tax - pay a fee to vote???) – BobE Mar 30 '18 at 22:40
0

I don't believe that there's a national voter database (that's a states issue in the USA), nor a citizen database - but the amount of information the Census collects is truly staggering, and they are not very "out and about" about how just much that is - quite effectively, as seen by point 3 in the accepted answer. They (apparently) would like you to believe that they just count you every 10 years, and hope you forget the "replacement for the widely despised census long form" the "American Community Survey" (just as widely despised, but by less people at once - it's the same intrusive questions) that they now send to a smaller sample of addresses every year, but that is really just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, they they make great protestations that the data is "solely for statistical purposes" but the nature and extent of data they do, in fact collect makes that questionable on its face, and despite laws making it illegal to use that data for various purposes, those laws could be changed (though it's unlikely.) The limits of those laws have been abused in 1942 and 2004 (that we know of) by providing finely targeted information on the location of Japanese-Americans and Arab-Americans, respectively. Not quite individuals, but how many of each in a census block or zip code. We know what that data was used for in 1942. In 2004 the unconvincing cover story was that it was "to know which airports needed signs in Arabic" (to which the "not a cover story" answer would be "all of them, the whole point of airports is that people from all over travel through them.")

While looking into this (again) because I was "randomly" (I doubt that) selected for the ACS (again - suspicious in the extreme given the supposed sampling frequency being considerably longer than the ACS has been in existence) I tumbled across papers I'll need to find and link 1 2 3 4 for this answer indicating that the census gets (some) data from literally every W-2, 1099, and 1040 filed every year - including name, address, date of birth, and SSN (they don't need to ask for it - they have it already in their extensive files on you, courtesy of the tax code.) "For statistical purposes" but it's not remotely anonymized in their files, only in data that's "publicly released." One of the linked papers mentions an "administrative records database" of more than 300 million individual entries.

Indeed one of the things that severely triggers me about the ACS is that they make bold claims that it's purely for statistics, followed by immediately asking for name and date of birth (which they already have from tax files, but they want to check up on you...) followed by lots of intrusive questions, many of which they already know the answers to, and a few they (probably) don't. Last time I checked, "purely for statistics" didn't come with a need for names.

If your parents ever claimed you, they know who your parents and siblings are, and they track and link that. Filed married - they track and link that. Every address that any W-2, 1099 or 1040 was mailed to or filed from - they have that. It's frankly creep-tastic. To that, they add the smattering of additional data they collect on any census where you were counted, whether as a minor (more family data linked) or a respondent, and any ACS you filled out in the ACS era. You don't need to file taxes to show up this way - any interest or dividend payment over $10 generates a 1099, and any legitimate work generates a W-2, even if you didn't make enough to file taxes.

Aside from the "time since they last 'randomly' picked me" being considerably shorter than the claimed "45 years per household" my main reason to think that the selection is non-random (which would indicate a disregard for valid random sampling) is that we filed taxes from a new address. And while they have records on each person going back to whenever their parents first claimed them on a tax form, here was an address that they didn't have an extensive dossier on with such "vital to statistics" information as toilet status and electrical bills.

Ecnerwal
  • 101
  • 2