Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here—about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights—is worth digging into, because it reveals something deeply broken about how major sports leagues think about the internet.
The 2025-2026 NFL season just wrapped up, and along with it came a federal court ruling in a case called Brown v. NFL that most people missed entirely. Two football fans—one in Illinois, one in California—sued the NFL under the Sherman Act, claiming the league violated antitrust law by barring its teams from posting on Bluesky. The fans wanted to follow their teams—the Bears and the now-champion Seahawks—on the platform they actually use, rather than on Elon Musk’s X. The court dismissed the case for lack of standing, and honestly, that was probably the right legal outcome.
The fans couldn’t demonstrate a concrete injury—the information they wanted was still available, for free, on X. As the court put it, their grievance reduced to being “denied the ability to obtain real-time NFL team information on a private platform with which they are ideologically comfortable.” And “I don’t like Elon Musk” is not an antitrust injury. The Sherman Act targets conspiracies that restrain trade and harm competition—not content distribution preferences. You can’t force a private organization to distribute its content on the platform you like best, just as we’ve called out attempts to force social media platforms to carry content they don’t want to carry.
But the fact that the NFL is legally allowed to be this myopic doesn’t make it a smart business decision. You can be entirely within your rights and still be making a spectacularly bad call.
Since 2013, the NFL has had a “content partnership” with X (dating back to when it was the useful site known as Twitter). The deal lets X publish real-time highlights, and in return the league gets… money, presumably. As the court noted in its ruling:
Since 2013, the NFL and X (formerly Twitter, Inc.) have had a “content partnership.” It allows X to publish real-time highlights from football games, such as touchdowns. During the offseason, reporters post on X with news about team practices and other NFL-related topics, and fans on X discuss teams’ acquisitions of free agents and other roster changes. For example, during the NFL draft (the high-profile annual event in which teams select eligible players to join their rosters), X published more than one million posts concerning the NFL; these appeared on users’ screens more than 800 million times. The NFL has repeatedly renewed its partnership with X. Fans do not pay money to receive NFL news on X.
Fine. Lots of organizations have deals with social media platforms. But this just seems like self-sabotage: the NFL apparently used this partnership as justification to tell its own teams they couldn’t even exist on a competing platform. Multiple NFL teams—including the New England Patriots—had set up accounts on Bluesky, started posting, and were building audiences. And then the league office stepped in and told them to shut it all down.
From the ruling:
Initially, multiple NFL teams, including the New England Patriots, had accounts on Bluesky to communicate with fans….
As alleged, however, the NFL later instructed its member teams to delete their Bluesky accounts. But for this instruction, at least some NFL teams would use Bluesky. The Patriots’ vice president of content, Fred Kirsch, for example, has stated: “Whenever the league gives us the green light[,] we’ll get back on Bluesky.”
Yes, the (Super Bowl-losing) Patriots’ VP of content is publicly saying his team wants to be on Bluesky and is just waiting for the league to let them. This wasn’t a case of teams being uninterested. Teams saw the audience there, set up shop, and were actively communicating with fans—and the NFL made them stop.
As Front Office Sports reported at the time, the league specifically told the Patriots to take down their Bluesky account. The league apparently hasn’t even approved Threads—Meta’s X competitor—for team real-time updates either.
So the NFL has essentially decided that when it comes to the kind of real-time updates that fans actually care about, X is the only approved outlet. Everything else is locked out.
This is “broadcast-brain” thinking applied to the internet, and it’s spectacularly dumb.
The NFL is treating social media platforms the way it treats regional sports networks or its Sunday Ticket package: as exclusive territories to be carved up and sold to the highest bidder. In the television world, that model makes a certain kind of sense—there’s a limited amount of spectrum, a limited number of cable channels, and that scarcity creates value. But social media doesn’t work that way. There’s no scarcity. Posting an injury report on Bluesky doesn’t remove it from X. Cross-posting is literally free. The entire point of social media for a brand is to be everywhere your audience is.
And the audience, increasingly, is on Bluesky. As Mashable noted last year heading into the season, the NFL community on Bluesky had already hit a kind of critical mass:
You need the presence and regular posting of big names to legitimize a platform. It certainly helped that folks like Kimes and alargeportionof theNFLwritersat popular sports sites like The Ringer made Bluesky home. And last season it felt like Bluesky hit terminal velocity, where enough people joined that you could fully exit to the site for football content. And with the migration of the professionals, the shitposters naturally came along, too. Because that’s where the discussion was happening. There is genuine, easy-to-find, fun NFL talk on Bluesky with minimal interruptions from, say,weird adsorangry reply guysyou might find on X.
That’s a real community. A vibrant, engaged community of exactly the kind of hardcore football fans that the NFL should be desperate to cultivate. These are, as Mashable noted, the “ball knowers.” They’ve moved to Bluesky because, well, X kind of sucks now for following sports. As Mashable also noted:
Bluesky does have a leg-up in some areas — Elon Musk’s site recently has proven unreliable for NFL fans. Thesite crashed the morning free agency launched, which is one of the most important days for NFL social media. And the sports tab — which used to be an easy, fun way to follow games in the Twitter days —degraded into near uselessnessyears ago. And, in general, X has morphed with Musk’s image, which is focusedmore on AIand politics — not things like following football. Of course you can still follow the NFL on X, but it does involve wading through more junk than it used to. Bluesky offers an interesting alternative in that regard.
So the most engaged, most knowledgeable football community has moved to Bluesky. The teams themselves want to be on Bluesky. And the NFL’s response to all of this is… to ban its teams from showing up.
It’s the digital equivalent of a local blackout (something we’ve been calling out for well over a decade)—punishing your most dedicated fans because of some deal you cut with a middleman in an effort to create an artificial and unnecessary scarcity.
Meanwhile, the platform the NFL is propping up with this exclusivity arrangement is one where fans who tuned in for the Super Bowl halftime show got to watch a significant chunk of the X user base have a full-blown racist meltdown over Bad Bunny performing. The NFL specifically chose Bad Bunny to appeal to a broader, more global audience—and the audience that actually appreciated the choice? They were on Bluesky where there was an overwhelming wave of support for the performance. The league is betting its real-time presence on the platform where its expansion strategy gets shouted down, while blocking teams from the one where those new fans are actually showing up.
This kind of control-freakery from the NFL shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the league’s behavior over the years. This is the same organization that has spent decades aggressively lying to bars, restaurants, and small businesses about the scope of its “Super Bowl” trademarks, sending threatening letters suggesting you can’t even say the words “Super Bowl” in an ad without a license—something that has never actually been true.
The NFL’s institutional DNA is “control equals value,” and they apply that logic to everything, from what a church can call its viewing party to which social media apps their teams are permitted to use.
The problem is that control-based thinking only works when you actually can control the ecosystem. You can (sort of) control which networks broadcast your games. You can control which streaming service gets Sunday Ticket. You cannot control where fans choose to talk about football on the internet. The conversation is going to happen whether the NFL’s official accounts are there or not. The only question is whether the league’s teams get to participate in it.
Any organization whose core business depends on fan engagement should be finding fans where they are, not herding them onto a single platform because you cut an exclusivity deal. Especially when that platform is increasingly known for being a hellscape of AI slop, political rage, and engagement-bait, while the platform you’re blocking your teams from is the one where people are actually talking about your product with genuine enthusiasm.
The NFL generates billions in revenue. And yet, when it comes to social media strategy, it’s stuck in a 2005 mindset. That’s not how any of this works anymore.
Someone at NFL HQ needs to understand that when your most passionate fans have moved to a new platform and your own teams are begging for permission to follow them there, the smart play is to let them go.
ICE can’t keep up with the baseline set by resident ghoul/White House advisor Stephen Miller. Miller has demanded 3,000 arrests per day, which he presented as the minimum he would be satisfied with.
To reach this goal, tons of talent from other federal law enforcement agencies have been added to the mix. The results have been less than impressive, to be entirely too kind to these kidnappers and murderers.
CBP and Border Patrol officers used to handling border crossing business are now roaming the streets of Midwestern cities looking for anyone who seems a bit too dark to be a native. In addition, nearly half of FBI agents have been placed on the “find the brown person” beat, along with volunteers/voluntolds from DEA, ATF, US Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and anyone else with a badge they’re unwilling to display prominently when raiding local day care centers.
The GOP threw a whole lot of money at ICE with the “Big Beautiful Bill.” ICE is throwing a lot of money at potential hires, much to the chagrin of law enforcement agencies everywhere, as well as already-understaffed prisons and jails.
The expectations were lowered, along with the bar for entry. The promise of a $50,000 signing bonus has managed to attract the expected blend of MAGA faithful, retired cops, bigots (but I repeat myself…), and anyone who thinks they have what it takes to frog-walk five-year-olds to the nearest rented SUV.
Hiring a bunch of people is only half the battle. The next step is preparing them to do their jobs. Ridding the nation of migrants is Job #1 here in America at the moment. But it’s a job too important to be done well by fully trained ICE officers. Quantity over quality is the name of the game, as former ICE trainer Ryan Schwank — who only resigned last week — told Congress. Here’s the Washington Post with the details:
[S]chwank… told congressional Democrats at a hearing that the agency eliminated 240 hours of “vital classes” from a mandatory 580-hour training program, including instruction about the legal boundaries for the use of force, how to safely handle firearms, and the proper way to detain and arrest immigrants.
Seems like a pretty sweet deal for new hires. Not only do they get a hefty signing bonus, but they don’t have to go through 40% of the training. Giving people guns and the power to deprive others of their lives and liberties should mean giving them the best possible training you can in hopes of heading off… well… pretty much everything we’ve been seeing lately during Trump’s anti-blue state/city surges.
Certainly, the administration is already doing everything it can to undercut the credibility of its now-former employee. But it’s not going to work unless you’re an idiot who prefers nigh-incoherent MAGA invective to actual facts. You see, Schwank didn’t just bring himself to this hearing. He also brought receipts.
Ahead of the hearing, Schwank provided a joint panel of House and Senate Democrats copies of internal ICE documents that he said show the extent of the cuts. The documents indicated that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Glynco, Georgia, shortened its training program from 72 days to 42 days.
Except that’s not what Todd Lyons said to Congress when he was asked to testify following two murders committed by federal officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Lyons claimed nothing important had been cut. He also said this, which is directly contradicted by the documents Schwank gave to lawmakers:
In a statement Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said ICE recruits receive 56 days of training before beginning their assignments…
Lyons went on to say that an “average” of 28 days of additional “on the job training” occurs after that. But even if you might believe Lyons is stacking his apples against the apples in ICE’s internal documents to come up with 84 days of training, you’re miscounting apples the same way Lyons is. OJT is post-assignment. Even if you choose to believe Lyons more than the documents his own agency generated, officers are still being put on the street two weeks earlier than they used to be.
The lies persist, of course. The statement provided to the Post says something else entirely, which is also contradicted by the documents and statements made by Schwank.
“No training hours have been cut. Our officers receive extensive firearm training, are taught de-escalation tactics, and receive Fourth and Fifth Amendment comprehensive instruction,” said Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the department.
But training hours have been cut. And the rest of it is pure horseshit, especially the part about training new hires about the Fourth and Fifth Amendment. Schwank’s testimony noted that he was asked to review an internal memo signed by Lyons that claimed — untruthfully — that ICE officers can enter people’s homes using only a self-issued administrative warrant.
Other rights were similarly glossed over. In fact, some of them are ignored completely.
[Schwank] also said that a two-hour class on the rights of protesters was shortened into 10 minutes of discussion during a lecture on “the concept of seizure.”
Nice. That’s the way to do it. Goodbye, First Amendment. Instead, here’s 10 minutes of ICE’s interpretative dance: “The Fourth Amendment, And What It Doesn’t Mean To Us.”
Everyone knew that once the cattle call began, ICE would be swarmed with opportunists who saw a great way to combine their bigotry and violence tendencies with a career — however short-lived — in public service. A steady paycheck, and all the government asked was that you show up at least 40% of the time during training.
This horde (actual number unknown) is being pushed through the doors towards their on-the-job-training, armed with little more than their masks, their guns, and some very comprehensive incorrecting of their constitutional notions.
Of course, none of this will matter to the people running ICE. I’m pretty sure they love this press. They have no interest in heading up a finely-tuned precise instrument of immigration law enforcement. They’d rather have the untargeted terrorizing of entire neighborhoods and the unearned swagger of a paramilitary death squad that somehow can still be hooted, horn-honked, and whistled into submission by suburbanites. And maybe this isn’t even an intentional design decision. There’s a good chance no one up top is intelligent enough to recognize the self-destructiveness of their actions. For now, at least, we know what they know. And we know this is wrong.
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after years of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so you could easily switch to competitors.
Verizon, as we’ve long established, hates competition, and early last year immediately got to work lobbying the Trump administration to destroy the rules (falsely) claiming, without evidence, that the modest phone unlocking requirements were a boon to criminals and scammers.
The pay-to-play Trump administration quickly agreed, killed the rules, and shortly thereafter Verizon started telling wireless customers on its many prepaid phone brands (including Tracfone) they had to wait a year before switching phones after purchasing one from Verizon:
“While a locked phone is tied to the network of one carrier, an unlocked phone can be switched to another carrier if the device is compatible with the other carrier’s network. But the new TracFone unlocking policy is stringent, requiring customers to pay for a full year of service before they can get a phone unlocked.”
Recently, Verizon implemented a whole bunch of additional restrictions made possible by the Trump administration. More specifically, they imposed a new 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off their device installment plan online or in the Verizon app and wants to take their device to another carrier:
“Payments made over the phone also trigger a 35-day waiting period, as do payments made at Verizon Authorized Retailers. Getting an immediate unlock apparently requires paying off the device plan at a Verizon corporate store.”
So first, they implemented the most draconian restrictions on its prepaid customers, who tend to be lower income and the most impacted from high prices. Now they’re starting to push restrictions onto their more lucrative postpaid (month to month) customers.
Verizon insists (falsely) that these restrictions are necessary to “prevent fraud,” but the real goal is to increase friction when it comes to switching to a competitor. They don’t want the press to outright acknowledge this is anti-competitive in coverage, so they’re engaging in the slow-boiling frog approach that just steadily makes porting your phone out steadily more difficult and annoying.
These unlocking conditions were broadly popular, served the public interest, and took decades of activism and reform advocacy to pass. They ensured that it was easier for consumers to switch between our ever-consolidating, anti-competitive wireless phone giants (consolidation directly made possible by the Trump administration’s past rubber stamping of shitty telecom mergers).
Verizon lobbied the FCC by repeatedly lying, without evidence, that these conditions resulted in a wave of black market phone thefts. FCC boss Brendan Carr, ever the industry lackey, parroted the lies in his subsequent industry-friendly rulings. You know, to make America great again via “populism” or whatever.
Verizon (and Carr) know that there’s a lot going on and the mundanity of a subject like phone unlocking won’t get much attention in the press. Given that the Trump administration has largely lobotomized regulatory independence (at Verizon’s request), there’s very little chance Verizon will see any future accountability, but it’s positively adorable that they’re proceeding cautiously just in case.
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If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it.
And yet, here we are.
Palantir Technologies, the infamous surveillance and data analytics giant chaired by Peter Thiel, has filed a lawsuit against Republik, a small Swiss online magazine, over a pair of investigative articles published in December. The articles, produced in collaboration with the investigative collective WAV, detailed a years-long, multi-ministry charm offensive by Palantir to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign was, by all accounts, a comprehensive failure. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product.
The reporting was based on documents obtained through 59 freedom of information requests filed with Swiss federal agencies. The key finding was an internal Swiss Armed Forces report that concluded Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks because sensitive military data could potentially be accessed by U.S. government intelligence agencies. As the Republik article details:
The authors of the report state that using Palantir’s software would increase dependence on a U.S. provider. It also poses the risk of losing data sovereignty and thereby national sovereignty.
Above all, however, the army’s staff experts say it remains unclear who has access to data shared with Palantir. The following sentence from the Swiss Army report is particularly relevant: “Palantir is a U.S.-based company, which means there is a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”
As if it’s any sort of surprise that European governments are wary of betting on US tech companies with close ties to the US government. It’s not like reports of US spies co-opting US tech companies for surveillance efforts haven’t been front page news over the past twenty years. And now, this administration—with its willingness to antagonize everyone in Europe, and its close ties to Palantir and Thiel? It’s no freaking wonder that the Swiss government was like “yo, maybe pass.”
So how does a sophisticated data intelligence company respond to well-sourced investigative journalism based on official government documents?
By suing the journalists, of course.
But here’s the thing that makes this even more absurd: Palantir isn’t even claiming the articles are false. The company isn’t suing for defamation. It isn’t seeking damages. Instead, it’s invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute, alleging that Republik didn’t give the company a sufficient opportunity to respond. Palantir wants the court to force the magazine to publish lengthy counter-statements to each article.
According to the FT:
Palantir’s lawsuit, filed in January, is not seeking damages or making libel claims against Republik, but instead alleges that the company was not given sufficient right to reply under Swiss media law. The company objects to Republik’s presentation of the public documents and believes its right to reply has been wrongfully denied.
….
Republik’s managing director Katharina Hemmer said Palantir had wanted the magazine to publish a very lengthy counterstatement to each article. Republik believed the proposed statements did not fairly address or rebut the reporting, she said, adding that the magazine stands by its reporting.
To which I say: good. Because Palantir’s demand here is absurd. Oh boo-fucking-hoo, the big defense contractor didn’t like the coverage? Pull on your big boy pants and get over it. Switzerland’s right of reply law exists so people can correct factual errors, not so corporations can force publications to run PR copy because they didn’t like the tone of accurate, document-based reporting.
And it’s worth noting: Palantir has already used other avenues to respond. The company published a blog post complaining that the Republik article “paints a false and misleading picture” and “hinders important discussions about the modernization of European software.” They’ve got the platform. If Palantir wants to push back on the story, they have many methods of doing so. Hell, they can do so on X any time they want—on what Musk and company like to call the global town square for free speech.
But that’s apparently not enough. Instead, a multibillion-dollar American defense and intelligence contractor is hauling a small independent Swiss magazine into court, not because anything the magazine published was wrong, but because Palantir wants to force the publication to run its talking points under legal compulsion.
Compelled speech isn’t free speech, guys. And this is nothing more than a blatant intimidation campaign to frighten away reporters from reporting the truth about Palantir.
The European Federation of Journalists has called this exactly what it is: a SLAPP suit—a strategic lawsuit against public participation, designed to use the weight and cost of litigation to intimidate and punish journalists for doing their jobs.
“The investigation conducted by WAV and Republik into Palantir is largely based on official documents that journalists were able to access thanks to Swiss freedom of information law,” notes EFJ President Maja Sever. “The legal action brought by this powerful multinational firm against a small Swiss media start-up is, in our view, an attempt at intimidation aimed at discouraging any critical analysis of Palantir’s activities.”
And in case you didn’t catch the irony: the Swiss military rejected Palantir in part because of fears about a heavy-handed American entity with uncomfortably close ties to U.S. intelligence. Palantir’s response to the reporting of that rejection? Behave like a heavy-handed American entity trying to bully a small foreign publication into submission. If anyone at Palantir had run this decision through their own pattern-recognition software, you’d hope a few red flags would have popped up.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit has done exactly what anyone with a passing familiarity with the Streisand Effect could have predicted. The original Republik articles were about the Swiss government politely but firmly declining Palantir’s advances—an embarrassing but relatively contained story.
Now, thanks to the lawsuit, the story has gone international. The Financial Times is covering it. The European Federation of Journalists is covering it. A UK member of parliament has already cited the Republik investigation during a debate on British defense contracts with Palantir, using the story to suggest that the British government “pivot away” from Palantir.
The Republik investigation itself is genuinely worth reading, and not just because Palantir desperately doesn’t want you to.
It paints a picture of a company that spent seven years working every angle to get Swiss federal agencies to buy its products—approaching the Federal Chancellery during COVID, pitching the Federal Office of Public Health on contact tracing, presenting anti-money laundering software to financial regulators, making repeated runs at the military—and getting turned away at every door. Sometimes embarrassingly, such as the Federal Statistical Office director apparently just ignoring Palantir’s outreach entirely.
For a company that brags about its ability to “optimize the kill chain” and whose CEO once told investors that “Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and occasionally kill them,” getting politely rejected by the Swiss statistical office has to sting a little.
But suing the journalists who reported on it? When the entire basis of your lawsuit is “we want you to publish our talking points” rather than “anything you published was wrong,” it makes pretty clear you don’t actually have a substantive response to the reporting. If Palantir thinks the picture is false, the remedy is to demonstrate that the documents are wrong—not to drag a small magazine through expensive litigation until it capitulates or goes broke.
Seriously, how fucking fragile are the egos in the Palantir executive suite that they can’t handle a bit of mildly embarrassing reporting? Grow up.
A Zurich court is expected to rule on the case in March. Whatever the outcome, Palantir has already lost the only contest that matters: the one for public perception. For a company that sells the ability to see around corners, they apparently never thought to search “The Streisand Effect.”
Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount’s latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible:
“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”
The merger was made possible, in part, by the Trump administration’s efforts to help Ellison and Paramount elbow out Netflix. That included a disinformation campaign across right wing media falsely portraying Netflix as a “woke” leftist company, as well as a fake DOJ antitrust investigation into Netflix (that will now mysteriously disappear now that Larry Ellison has likely gotten his prize).
I’d like you to take a peek at the news coverage of this whole mess and notice how few outlets even acknowledge that Trump administration corruption played a role, much less acknowledge that the goal here is autocratic-friendly propaganda.
The massive debt load from massively overpaying for Warner Brothers is also likely to cause major operational headaches that could result in this being a short-lived adventure much like the several-decades worth of pointless Warner media mergers (including AT&T) that preceded it.
That’s a lot of money for the Ellisons (and the Saudis) to dump into a company that has, again, seen nothing but a two-decade history of disastrous overvalued mergers resulting in a progressively shittier and less creative company, broadly despised by creatives after a parade of brutal layoffs (much more of which are certainly coming to pay off debt).
Things could could be further complicated by a sudden subscriber exodus across the brands, or the Ellisons’ fortunes being further strained by a potential AI hype bubble collapse. All the lazy AI-generated Batman IP slop in the world will not be able to save this mess if the winds don’t blow favorably in the Ellisons’ direction over the next two years.
Still, an overt authoritarian oligarch is now very close to controlling an unprecedented segment of U.S. traditional and new media. If it follows the established autocratic playbook, this push will continue until it runs into something other than pudding-soft public, political, and policy opposition. There’s a window here for policymakers and consumers to ensure the gambit fails, but the hour is getting late.
Measles. Yes, yes, I know you’re sick of hearing about it. For that, though, you must lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and this entire administration of clown-tools that isn’t bothering to do anything about what has become the worst continuous outbreak of the disease in America in several decades. Their fault, not mine.
And, yes, this is getting worse, not better. The CDC’s measles tracking site is a combination of woefully inaccurate and behind when it comes to current case counts (more to come on that shortly), but it’s at least useful in benchmarking what 2025 looked like. While certainly underreported, the CDC tallied 2,281 cases of measles in America last year. That site is updated only once a week on Fridays. Either due to that, or incompetence, or a more nefarious attempt to downplay the problem, the current case count is wrong.
The CDC site shows a 2026 case count of 982. That would be bad enough, but it’s actually worse. The actual count is well over 1,000 cases, which means we’re somewhere right around half of 2026’s case total as of right now. So you don’t feel the need to check a calendar, it’s still February.
“It is very concerning to see more than 1,000 cases in the U.S. this early in the year,” Martha Edwards, MD, president of the South Carolina Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told MedPage Today. “Already, we have more than half the number of cases seen in all of 2025, and the number of cases in 2025 was one of the highest annual case counts seen in decades.”
“As people continue to believe inaccurate information about vaccines, and as non-medical exemption rates continue to rise throughout the country, we can expect case counts to continue to rise, threatening children and immunocompromised individuals with a disease that was nearly eliminated in our country through vaccination,” she added.
The true number is going to be even higher than that. There are outbreaks of one size or another in many, many states. South Carolina alone has nearly 1,000 reported cases. The truly frustrating thing about all of this is that this problem is a simple one to fix. More people need to get vaccinated for measles via the widely available MMR vaccine.
To achieve that, the government needs to do two simple things. First, cut the shit when it comes to the misinformation about vaccines that is scaring the hell out of a percentage of the population. In fact, advocate for those same vaccines. Get Kennedy hopped up on those psychedelics he likes if you need to, but he needs to be front and center telling people to get vaccinated. And stop the nonsense that is going on with supposed religious exemptions for vaccinations.
Edwards highlighted the need for “accurate information about the dangers of measles virus and the complications that can ensue, in addition to communicating the safety and efficacy of the measles vaccine.”
“Raising the bar to obtain non-medical exemptions for vaccines and requiring families to gain accurate information about the dangers of vaccine-preventable illnesses and the importance of vaccines would be a huge benefit in helping to raise vaccination rates in South Carolina and the rest of the country,” she added. “We would love to see a requirement for parents to come in person to the health department, watch a video on vaccine-preventable illnesses, and have a conversation with a healthcare professional before they choose non-medical exemptions.”
Second, take the data collection and sharing about measles seriously. Along those same lines, demonstrate leadership by helping state governments and local medical facilities collect and share data, strategize protective measures to stop the spread of the disease, and pump the ecosystem full of real-time accurate information about where the disease is, how it spreads, and how to handle an infection.
That isn’t happening. Instead, you get stories like how South Carolina’s state government doesn’t require any mandatory reporting of measles cases in the state when patients are admitted. One doctor in the state had to find out that patients in her own area had been hospitalized with measles from Facebook.
Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician working a county away, wasn’t even aware that anyone in South Carolina had been hospitalized with measles-related illnesses until a short time later when she logged on to Facebook and saw someone relay the distraught husband’s comments.
Part of the reason Bragg didn’t know is that South Carolina doesn’t require hospitals to report admissions for measles, potentially obscuring the disease’s severity. In the absence of mandatory reporting rules, she and other doctors are often left to rely on rumors, their grapevines of colleagues, and the fragments of information the state public health agency is able to gather and willing to share.
So, what you get is South Carolina reporting that roughly 2% of its measles cases have resulted in hospitalization. Nobody with any knowledge of measles thinks that is even remotely accurate.
“A hospitalization rate at 2% is ludicrous,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who served on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s immunization advisory committee.
“It’s vast underreporting,” Offit said. “Measles makes you sick.”
Without that sort of accurate data, neither the state nor federal government knows where to help, nor how how much help is needed. If Kennedy and Trump wanted to actually confront this growing problem, that’s the kind of organization the federal government and its health-related agencies could help with. But this administration seems content to put its hands over its eyes and shout, “Nuh uh, I can’t see you!”
This is going to continue to get worse until real action is taken. Until then, I guess we all just try to keep an eye out for rashes.
In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork, a podcast that makes sense of the rapidly changing world of tech. Together, they discuss:
I’ll take my joy where I can. And this iteration of the Trump DOJ continues to provide bright bursts of schadenfreude-tinted sunshine.
Any competent DOJ can close cases. Any barely competent prosecutor can push a case past a grand jury. Any sufficiently slippery solicitor (mixing in some British for the sheer alliteration of it all) can convince a judge that the lies told by officers were merely good faith blunders not worthy of anything more than a judicial “no one’s perfect” shrug.
This DOJ fails at every single level. It can’t secure indictments. It can’t convince grand juries that vindictive prosecutions are legitimate prosecutions. And its prosecutors are constantly undermined by (1) prejudicial, fact-free social media posts and public statements by administration officials, (2) the illegal actions of federal officers, (3) their own ineptitude, (4) the lies told by federal officers, and (5) any or all of the above.
High-level prosecutors keep getting sidelined because they’ve been illegally appointed. Other prosecutors have refused to engage with the administration’s vindictive plans, resulting in most of them retiring or being fired. Consequently, there’s a shortage of qualified, experienced prosecutors. The void is being constantly refilled by some of the emptiest people ever to leverage MAGA loyalty into federal employment.
It took less than a year for the Trump DOJ to almost completely destroy the “presumption of regularity” — the legal concept that the government is acting in good faith, even if its legal arguments aren’t the best. It took less than a year for the Trump DOJ to turn grand juries into coin flips.
In 2016, the most recent year for which the Justice Department has published data, federal prosecutors concluded more than 155,000 prosecutions and declined over 25,000 cases presented by investigators. In only six instances was a grand jury’s refusal to indict listed as the reason for dropping the matter.
Six times in a one year over 25,000 declined cases. Trump’s loyalist US Attorney pick, Lindsey Halligan, put her insurance law background to work and… managed to do this twice during a single (attempted) prosecution.
When prosecutors aren’t shooting themselves in the foot (or being shot in the foot by their employer), they’re losing cases because the people they expect to back up their cases — the federal officers claiming to have been assaulted, etc. — can’t even back up their own narratives when testifying in court.
The most recent significant fumble came from Minneapolis prosecutors, who last week dismissed felony assault charges they had filed against two Venezuelan men accused of “violently beating” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer “with weapons” on 14 January.
According to the early government narrative, federal officers were assaulted by “violent criminal illegal aliens” during a stop of an undocumented Venezuelan. The officers claimed two other men came out of a nearby apartment and attacked an officer with a “snow shovel and broom handle.” That case is now dead because… well, the testifying officers lied.
[O]n 12 February, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss both men’s cases, saying: “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the complaint affidavit.”
[…]
ICE director Todd Lyons said ICE and the DoJ had opened an investigation into the case after videos revealed “sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements”, marking a rare acknowledgement of possible wrongdoing by DHS officials.
It’s extremely rare for the government to dismiss its own prosecution with prejudice, meaning it can’t ever seek to refile these criminal charges against the alleged perpetrators. And I don’t know if Todd Lyons just misspoke or if he actually tried to use the exonerative tense while simultaneously stating these officers lied. “Sworn testimony… appears to have made untruthful statements” sounds like the courtroom version of a government official discussing a shooting by an officer with the phrase “the officer’s weapon discharged,” suggesting no one actually pulled the trigger.
Whatever the case, there’s definitely a trend here.
In Chicago, of 92 people arrested for assaulting or impeding officers last fall, 74 cases have resulted in no charges; in 13 cases, charges were filed and dismissed; and five charged cases were still pending, a recent investigation by Fox 9, a Minneapolis-based station, showed. As of the end of January, there have been no convictions.
In LA, the federal public defenders have won all six cases filed against ICE protesters that have gone to trial since June, the LA Times recently reported. Fewer than 1% of federal criminal defendants were acquitted across the US in fiscal year 2024, with US prosecutors traditionally having a roughly 90% conviction rate, the paper noted.
I assume the DOJ bloodshed will continue. Trump hates losing and he hates people who lose in his name even more. But replacing talent with loyalists isn’t going to end this losing streak. If nothing else, this iteration of the DOJ has the chance to go down in history as one of the worst ever assembled, even if we consider nothing else but its win-loss record.
It doesn’t mean the DOJ is harmless, however. It’s still more than willing to engage in vindictive prosecutions, ignore court orders, and take bite after bite of the apple (so to speak) until it finally manages to at least pierce the skin. And that means a lot of people are going to have their lives upended, even if only temporarily, just to please a tyrant who thinks anything or anyone presenting even the most minimal of opposition should be subjected to punishment.
When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback.
Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate.
The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.
At Trump’s direction, DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. Many of the nation’s Republican secretaries of state have eagerly embraced the experiment, agreeing to upload all or part of their rolls.
But an examination of SAVE’s rollout by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reveals that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data and before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information.
As a result, SAVE has made persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing the status of people born outside the U.S., data gathered from local election administrators, interviews and emails obtained via public records requests show. Some of those people subsequently become U.S. citizens, a step that the system doesn’t always pick up.
Texas and Missouri were among the first states to try the augmented tool.
In Missouri, state officials acted on SAVE’s findings before attempting to confirm them, directing county election administrators to make voters flagged as potential noncitizens temporarily unable to vote. But in hundreds of cases, the tool’s determinations were wrong, our review found. Lennon was among dozens of clerks statewide who raised alarms about the system’s errors.
“It really does not help my confidence,” she said, “that the information we are trying to use to make really important decisions, like the determination of voter eligibility, is so inaccurate.”
In Texas, news reports began emerging about voters being mistakenly flagged as noncitizens soon after state officials announced the results of running the state’s voter roll through SAVE in October.
Our reporting showed these errors were more widespread than previously known, involving at least 87 voters across 29 counties. County election administrators suspect there may be more. Confusion took hold when the Texas secretary of state’s office sent counties lists of flagged voters and directed clerks to start demanding proof of citizenship and to remove people from the rolls if they didn’t respond.
“I really find no merit in any of this,” said Bobby Gonzalez, the elections administrator in Duval County in South Texas, where SAVE flagged three voters, all of whom turned out to be citizens.
Even counting people flagged in error, the first bulk searches using SAVE haven’t validated the president’s claims that voting by noncitizens is widespread. At least seven states with a total of about 35 million registered voters have publicly reported the results of running their voter rolls through the system. Those searches have identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01% of registered voters — as noncitizens. This aligns with previous findings that noncitizens rarely register to vote.
Brian Broderick leads the verification division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS branch that oversees SAVE. In an interview this month, he acknowledged the system can’t always find the most current citizenship information for people not born in the U.S. But he defended the tool, saying it was ultimately up to states to decide how to use SAVE data.
“So we’re giving a tool to these folks to say, ‘Hey, if we can verify citizenship, great, you’re good. If we can’t, now it’s up to you to determine whether to let this person on your voter rolls,’” Broderick said.
In Texas, Secretary of State Jane Nelson declined an interview request. Her spokesperson, Alicia Pierce, said the office hadn’t reviewed SAVE’s citizenship determination before sending lists to counties because it isn’t an investigative agency. In a statement, Pierce added that the use of SAVE was part of the office’s “constitutional and statutory duty to ensure that only eligible citizens participate in Texas elections.”
A spokesperson for Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins called SAVE a valuable resource even though some people it flagged might later be confirmed as citizens. “No system is 100% accurate,” Hoskins said in an interview, “but we’re working to get it right.”
Asked whether it was problematic that his office directed clerks to temporarily bar voters from casting ballots before verifying SAVE’s findings, Hoskins said that was a “good point.”
While 27 states have agreed to use SAVE, others have hesitated, concerned not only about inaccuracies, but also about privacy and the data’s potential to be used in immigration enforcement. Indeed, speaking at a recent conference, Broderick said that when SAVE flags voters as noncitizens, they are also referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation. (It is a crime to falsely claim citizenship when registering to vote.)
People who’ve been flagged by SAVE in error say it’s jarring to have to provide naturalization records to stay eligible to vote when they know they’ve done nothing wrong.
Sofia Minotti, who lives north of Dallas in Denton County, was born in Argentina but became a U.S. citizen years ago. Nonetheless, she was one of 84 Denton County voters identified by SAVE as a potential noncitizen. She and 11 others have since provided proof of citizenship, giving the system an error rate in the county of at least 14%.
The real rate is probably higher, a county official acknowledged, since some of those sent notices to prove their citizenship might not respond in time to meet the deadline. They’ll have to be reinstated to vote in the midterms later this year.
Minotti, though still on the rolls, felt singled out unfairly.
“I’m here legally, and everything I’ve done has been per the law,” she said. “I really have no idea why I had to prove it.”
Election administrators in many states have long hungered for better access to federal information on citizenship status.
States don’t typically require people to provide proof of citizenship when they sign up to vote, only to attest to it under penalty of perjury. Previous efforts to use state data to catch noncitizens on voter rolls have gone poorly. Texas officials had to abandon a 2019 push after it became clear their methodology misidentified thousands of citizens, many of them naturalized, as ineligible voters.
Until recently, SAVE hadn’t been much of a resource. State and local election officials needed to have voters’ DHS-assigned immigration ID numbers — information not collected in the registration process — to verify their citizenship status. Plus, officials had to pay to conduct searches one by one, not in bulk.
In March, Trump issued an executive order that required DHS to give states free access to federal citizenship data and partner with the Department of Government Efficiency to comb voter rolls.
The system’s main addition was confidential Social Security Administration data, which allowed states to search using full or partial Social Security numbers and incorporated information on millions of Americans who were not previously in Homeland Security databases.
David Jennings, Broderick’s deputy at USCIS, had pressed his team to move quickly, he said on a June video call with members of former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, which has spread false claims about noncitizen voting.
“We tested it and deployed it to our users in two weeks,” Jennings said on the call, which ProPublica obtained a recording of. “I think that’s remarkable. Kind of proud of it.”
Jennings added that to get quick access to the Social Security data, which has been tightly guarded, USCIS partnered with DOGE. (In an unrelated matter, DOGE has since been accused of misusing Social Security data.) Jennings did not respond to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune.
Perhaps because of its accelerated timetable, USCIS expanded the system before meeting legal requirements to inform the public about how the data would be collected, stored and used, according to voting rights organizations that sued. (UCSIS did not respond to a request for comment about this.) It also blew past concerns from voter advocacy groups about the accuracy of SSA’s citizenship data, which multiple audits and analyses have shown is often outdated or incomplete. This is particularly true for people not born in the U.S., who often get Social Security numbers well before they become citizens.
According to emails obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune, SAVE first checks SSA’s citizenship information. If that shows a voter isn’t a citizen, DHS searches other databases, but it can be difficult to locate and match all the data the systems have on a person. This can lead to errors.
Broderick said in the interview that Trump’s executive order dramatically accelerated the timetable for launching SAVE, getting agencies to cooperate and move quickly. But he insisted the work was done responsibly.
“Do I think it was reckless? Do I think it wasn’t planned? Do I think it wasn’t tested? Absolutely not,” he said.
By September, Texas had uploaded its entire list of more than 18 million registered voters into SAVE. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming put voter data into the system, too.
They would soon start to unveil what SAVE had found.
One of the first out of the gate was Texas. In late October, with early voting underway in state and local elections, Nelson, the secretary of state, announced SAVE had identified 2,724 potential noncitizens on the rolls.
But as Nelson delegated the task of investigating those voters’ statuses to local election officials, confusion took hold.
At a meeting, Nelson’s staff told county clerks’ offices to investigate flagged voters and then send notices to those for whom they were unable to confirm citizenship. In a follow-up email, Nelson’s staff told the clerks they should already have heard from someone in the office with more details.
That set off a chain of messages on the local officials’ email group
Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis said he hadn’t been contacted and had just learned the county had 97 flagged voters. Marsha Barbee, in Wharton County near Houston, shared that she talked to a Nelson staffer who said she’d been directed not to tell local officials about their lists because they were in the middle of early voting.
“They said we have enough on our plates and didn’t want us to worry right now,” Barbee wrote.
In the absence of clear state guidance, clerks proceeded inconsistently. Some said they didn’t act on their lists, waiting for more direction. Others, unsure how to investigate flagged voters’ status, said they simply sent notices asking for proof of citizenship, though some opted not to remove nonresponsive voters from the rolls.
“I give them many chances; I don’t just expire them right away,” Dee Wilcher, a clerk in East Texas’ Anderson County, said about flagged voters, adding that she wanted to avoid removing citizens from the rolls and looking “stupid.”
Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said many clerks expressed frustration with the secretary of state’s lack of guidance and failure to help with investigations. When he shared clerks’ concerns, McGinn said Nelson’s staff didn’t respond, leading him to conclude that checking SAVE’s findings wasn’t an agency priority.
He called the state’s use of SAVE “more political and appearance-based” than a practical way to ensure election integrity.
One way to check SAVE’s findings would have been to get information from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship if residents register to vote when obtaining a driver’s license. The secretary of state’s office didn’t do this and didn’t direct counties to either.
Several county officials said they hadn’t thought to ask DPS for information; those who did often found the agency had documentation showing some of the voters who SAVE identified as noncitizens were in fact citizens.
In the Texas Panhandle, Potter County elections officials quickly confirmed through DPS that three of nine voters on their list had proof of citizenship on file. In neighboring Randall County, DPS helped officials verify that one in five had a U.S. passport, according to interviews with the local officials.
In December, Travis County learned that 11 of the 97 voters flagged by SAVE had proven their citizenship to DPS. After getting the data, the county’s voter registrar, Celia Israel, said in an interview that she felt even more uncomfortable about moving forward with sending notices to voters, given SAVE’s errors.
“It has proven to be inaccurate,” she said. “Why would I rely on it?”
To be sure, SAVE also identified some people who weren’t eligible to vote, clerks said. Several came across instances in which voters marked on registration forms that they weren’t citizens, but were registered by election office staffers in error. Clerks also said voters have told them they’d misunderstood questions about eligibility when getting drivers’ licenses. (It’s not clear if any of those registered in error voted; overall, noncitizensrarely vote.)
ProPublica and the Tribune surveyed the 177 Texas counties that had voters flagged by SAVE, receiving data from 97 that had either checked DPS records or sent notices to voters to try to verify SAVE’s citizenship information. Overall, more than 5% of the voters SAVE identified as noncitizens proved to be citizens. In some smaller counties, most of those flagged were eligible to vote. That includes six of 11 in the Panhandle’s Moore County, and two of three in Erath County, near Dallas.
But some of those who didn’t respond to notices also might be citizens.
In Denton County, where Sofia Minotti lives, checks by elections administrator Frank Phillips’ staff delivered clear answers on the citizenship status of 26 of the 84 voters flagged by SAVE. Twelve, including Minotti, proved they were citizens. Fourteen more had marked on their registration forms that they weren’t and the blame rested with workers for registering them nonetheless.
Phillips said he removed anyone who didn’t provide proof by the deadline from the rolls to comply with the secretary of state’s instructions, but he fears some were eligible voters.
“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Phillips said. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”
At least initially, Missouri took a more targeted approach to SAVE than Texas did. State officials used the system to search for information on a subset of about 6,000 voters they had reason to think might not be citizens, according to emails between federal and state officials.
The state had results by October, but in early November, a USCIS official wrote to Missouri and four other states to say some people flagged by SAVE as noncitizens were actually citizens, emails obtained through public records requests show.
“We have continued to refine our processes used to obtain and review the citizenship data available to us,” the official wrote, adding that one such improvement revealed the errors.
The staffer attached amended search results, but Missouri officials withheld the attachment from its response to a public records request and did not respond to a question about how many corrections were made.
Based on the updated data from USCIS, Missouri sent lists of flagged voters to county election administrators in November. ProPublica and the Tribune obtained these lists for seven of 10 most populous counties in the state, which show SAVE initially identified more than 1,200 people as noncitizens just in these areas.
The Missouri secretary of state’s office told election administrators it would work to verify SAVE’s citizenship determinations. In the meantime, local officials were instructed to change the status of flagged voters, making them temporarily unable to vote.
The lists were met with swift pushback from county election officials, who, like Lennon, soon spotted people they knew to be citizens and questioned the directive’s legality. On a group call in November, they traded examples, saying they recognized neighbors, colleagues and people they’d helped to register at naturalization ceremonies.
In St. Louis, the Board of Election Commissioners didn’t alter the eligibility of anyone on its flagged voter list after being advised not to by its attorney.
Rachael Dunn, a spokesperson for Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, said state law allows officials to change voters’ status during investigations into their eligibility — for example, if there are signs they’ve moved. The laws she cited don’t directly address investigations into citizenship status, however.
In early December, some 70 clerks, Republicans and Democrats, wrote a letter to Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson saying there were better ways than SAVE to keep noncitizens off voter rolls.
Weeks later, the state’s election integrity director, Nick La Strada, wrote USCIS to ask why a voter that SAVE had identified as a noncitizen in October had showed up in a more recent search as a citizen.
A USCIS official replied that between the initial search and the follow-up, DHS had gotten access to passport data, which contains more up-to-date citizenship information on some people not born in the U.S.
The USCIS staffer explained that some of the most accurate citizenship information — which is within DHS’ own records — still wasn’t searchable in SAVE because running that kind of search would require the voter’s DHS identifier, which can’t always be located. The staffer said they were working on improvements but those could take until March.
“You don’t start with something at that scale until you work the bugs out, and that is not the case here,” Clinton Jenkins, president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities, said in an interview. Jenkins is also the clerk for Miller County in the Ozarks.
In early January, in what was framed as a “SAVE review update,” the secretary of state’s office sent counties across Missouri revised lists with reduced numbers of voters identified as potential noncitizens. It instructed election administrators to move voters who’d been initially flagged in error by SAVE back to active status, restoring their eligibility to vote.
Dunn, Hoskins’ spokesperson, didn’t specify what prompted these adjustments. Even the new lists may not be final, she acknowledged. Once the review is complete, the state has said it plans to send letters to those still on the lists, demanding proof of citizenship and giving recipients 90 days to respond.
The addition of new data to SAVE makes it a more valuable resource, she maintained, “while also reinforcing the need for careful, layered review before any action is taken.”
After the January revision, St. Louis County’s initial list of 691 potential noncitizens dropped to 133.
Zuzana Kocsisova, who lives in St. Louis, was among those incorrectly flagged by SAVE on its first pass. Originally from Slovakia, she became a U.S. citizen in 2019. She showed ProPublica and the Tribune a copy of her naturalization certificate, which she keeps with a letter from Trump congratulating her for “becoming a citizen of this magnificent land.”
When a reporter told her that SAVE had initially identified her as a potential noncitizen, she said she wasn’t surprised. She saw it as part of the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants. She was more frustrated than relieved to learn that she wasn’t on the smaller list of flagged voters sent in January.
“Overall, it seems like this process has done more to worry people who can vote than to identify actual registered voters who don’t qualify,” she said. “It’s just a waste of resources. I don’t think it makes the elections any more safe.”
In Boone County, where Lennon is the clerk, the count of flagged voters fell from 74 to 33 and the naturalized citizen who Lennon’s staff helped register was no longer on the list.
Lennon said she and other county clerks would happily accept data that helps them correctly identify noncitizens on their voter rolls. But so far, SAVE hasn’t done that. And until it does, she said, she won’t purge voters purely because SAVE has flagged them.
“This is not ready for prime time,” Lennon said. “And I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.”
