The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.
The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.
NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.
For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources.
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.