On Tuesday, the Social Security Administration announced the “most comprehensive SSN record clean-up in the agency’s 91-year history” as part of an ongoing effort “to strengthen the accuracy and integrity” of the SSN database.
Early in the current Trump administration, Elon Musk claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had discovered a shocking number of records in the Social Security database: 398 million.
Musk, in an X post, broke then-current numbers down by age group. The breakdown revealed records for over 12.2 million people in the database who were over the age of 120. If you expand that group to include everyone over the age of 100, the total increases to almost 20 million records.
The Social Security Administration wrote that it has “corrected nearly 15 percent of all active SSNs across approximately 330 million U.S. citizens and nearly 390 million total records.” This could result in more efficient implementation of Social Security benefits by validating identities and preventing improper benefit payments.
According to the press release:
- SSA has added 17 million dates of death to records that previously lacked this information, using a combination of internal SSA systems and Department of State data.
- Through data received from the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) service, SSA has updated approximately 25 million records that previously had missing citizenship information.
- SSA is currently in the process of correcting an additional 8.5 million records with inaccurate citizenship status.
- The agency has implemented stronger internal controls to prevent inaccuracies due to manual data entry from occurring in the future.
What This Could Mean For Election Integrity
From an election-integrity standpoint, this could have massive implications for how states validate a voter’s eligibility, especially for mail-in ballots.
The SSA database is a key source used to verify identity, citizenship status, and whether a person is recorded as deceased. “Dead people voting” has been a long-standing claim of election integrity groups, and now, with the disclosure that 17 million records lacked “dates of death,” that claim has new meaning.
Furthermore, “illegals voting” has been another long-standing claim. We learned through this most recent press release that 25 million records “previously had missing citizenship information.” Again, that is a substantial number, considering that the database was a primary verification tool for U.S. citizenship.
According to the release, 8.5 million records with “inaccurate citizenship status” are in the process of being corrected.
In total, this extensive, ongoing clean-up operation has already updated and/or corrected more than 50 million records. It is unknown how many of those records could be present currently on states’ voter rolls.
Following President Trump’s prime-time address on election integrity in July, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave a follow-up press conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. During that press conference, he issued a warning to the states. Politico reported at the time:
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday said officials who don’t cooperate with the administration’s election security efforts may be slapped with fines — and potentially prison time.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections — and they chose not to — then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said during a press conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Mullin also vowed that DHS would work to “make our security enhancements mandatory” for states. He promised to withhold federal election security grants until state officials take steps the administration demanded, including running their voter registration lists through a system that checks for non-citizen voters on the rolls.
So what tool has the federal government made available to the states for doing such work? The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, for starters.
Last month, the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on the SAVE system after a lower court blocked it, allowing it to be used by the individual states to verify voter eligibility. The states can now utilize the query system supplied by the federal government on a voluntary basis.
According to USCIS.gov, the SAVE system is:
“…an information service whereby user agencies submit information (such as name, date of birth, and an enumerator) and SAVE uses that information to query against source government systems, including those maintained by DHS, Department of State (DoS), and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to verify and provide, if retrievable, a point-in-time response that includes the individual’s U.S. citizenship or immigration status.”
The page also states that, “Based on SSA data, SAVE can verify the U.S. citizenship of most U.S.-born individuals as well as check the SSA Death Master File.”
This clean-up could have direct implications for mail-in ballots. Individuals in the SSA database who are deceased or non-citizens, but whose records don’t reflect that, aren’t necessarily showing up to cast votes in person, especially the dead ones.
And they themselves aren’t necessarily casting mail-in ballots either.
But are mail-in ballots being cast in their names?
Mail-in voting has tripled since 1996 and grown from 17.4% of total voter turnout in 2008 to 42% in 2020 during the COVID era. In 2024, the total mail-in vote turnout trickled back to around 30%.
And the numbers go up even more in crucial but often overlooked primary elections. For example, Michigan reported that “voters choosing mail ballot at record pace; requests up 68.5% over the same point in 2022.” Three Democrats currently occupy the highest state-level offices despite President Trump winning the state in 2016 and 2024, and potentially in 2020 as well.
Several grassroots canvassing efforts in Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan following the 2020 election reported disproportionate numbers of “phantom voters,” suggesting that ballots may be assigned to voters who don’t exist at the addresses listed on the states’ voter rolls.
Given the extensive record cleanup by the SSA, comparing election results in states that choose to use SAVE for voter verification with those states’ previous election results could help identify potential issues for further investigation.
“Plausible Deniability”?
In July, Secretary Mullin also sent several states a “preliminary review” showing “tens of thousands of non-citizens” illegally on the states’ voter rolls.
The states included:
- California (190,832 non-citizens)
- New Jersey (35,152 non-citizens)
- Nevada (15,903 non-citizens)
- Pennsylvania (14,576 non-citizens)
Secretary Mullin concluded the letters by calling on the secretaries of state to respond within two weeks and “confirm their intentions to collaborate with DHS in order to ensure free, fair, and honest elections.”
Yesterday, Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, and Governor Newsom’s Press Office engaged in a back-and-forth on X regarding a statement, made in opposition to a request for a temporary restraining order, that the Los Angeles County registrar “is not equipped or authorized to verify voter citizenship.”
The Newsom’s Press Office account accurately claimed that California adheres to 52 USC §20504(c)(2), telling Essayli he “may want to brush up on [his] election law before tweeting.”
F.A. Essayli responded by citing 18 USC §611:
It shall be unlawful for any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for federal office.
He followed that with a citation to 18 USC §2:
Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission is punishable as a principal.
This could indicate that the Department of Justice’s notice serves as a warning to Los Angeles County officials that processing ballots cast by noncitizens could expose them to allegations of knowingly facilitating illegal voting, as suggested in this post:
The post Social Security Administration Announces “Most Comprehensive Clean-Up” in Agency’s History – What This Could Mean For Elections appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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