This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

In October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued pharmaceutical companies tied to Tylenol in state court, repeating claims made a month earlier by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the pain relief drug was linked to autism and ADHD in children.

Paxton, a close ally of the Trump administration who had already announced a U.S. Senate bid, accused drugmakers of marketing Tylenol to pregnant mothers without disclosing its dangers. “The reckoning has arrived,” the state’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies Johnson & Johnson, Kenvue Brands and Kenvue Inc.

“By holding Big Pharma accountable for poisoning our people, we will help Make America Healthy Again,” Paxton proclaimed in a news release that echoed Kennedy’s slogan.

Paxton hired the Chicago law firm Keller Postman to argue the case in state court. The firm had served as lead counsel in a similar case about Tylenol’s safety that was dismissed a year earlier by a New York federal judge who found the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses unreliable.

But the court the attorneys chose to bring the suit in wasn’t in Austin or any of the state’s large counties that have extensive experience and multiple judges handling large, complex litigation. It was in Panola County, a community of 23,000 residents on the Louisiana border that Trump carried by 67 points two years ago and whose sole state district court judge is a Republican.

At a hearing that month in the three-story brick courthouse in the county seat of Carthage, Kim Bueno, the lawyer representing the drugmakers, accused Paxton’s office of pushing a baseless lawsuit through forum shopping — seeking out judges and juries that plaintiffs believe will be most favorable to them, rather than filing suit in the courts that most commonly handle similar cases.

“These claims have been rejected over and over and over again in courts of law by the same plaintiff’s counsel,” said Bueno, who declined an interview request. “And now they’re trying, once again, to suggest that Tylenol is harmful for women when pregnant. And it’s been soundly rejected.”

The case was not the first that Paxton’s office had filed in a county with little connection to the allegations of wrongdoing made by his office. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have identified at least 30 cases filed by the attorney general over the past nine years that have a tenuous connection to the counties in which they were filed.

The filings mark a striking departure from Paxton’s previous opposition to the practice. In a 2017 legal brief that Paxton wrote on behalf of 17 states, he urged the U.S. Supreme Court to crack down on forum shopping in federal courts. The practice, he wrote, “has the pernicious effect of reducing confidence in the fairness and neutrality of our Nation’s justice system.”

Paxton’s approach also subverts what the Legislature intended when it passed a law in the 1990s that required plaintiffs to file lawsuits in counties where a “substantial” part of the alleged violation took place, according to three legal experts. That was done at the behest of conservatives who felt trial lawyers were flocking to venues favorable to them to win big damage verdicts against businesses.

“It looks like the attorney general’s office is interested in engaging in litigation games that it would otherwise decry if the shoe were on the other foot,” said Michael Ariens, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, who has studied laws regulating where lawsuits can be filed.

Neither of Paxton’s Republican predecessors, Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, appears to have employed this strategy. ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed hundreds of cases filed outside of the state’s five large urban counties during their tenures. Each had a clear connection to the venue Abbott or Cornyn chose.

Neither Abbott nor Cornyn, who Paxton is trying to unseat, responded to requests for comment. Trump on Tuesday endorsed Paxton in the race.

Texas’ major consumer protection law gives the attorney general some flexibility with those cases despite the state’s broader restriction on forum shopping. The office does not have to prove that a substantial part of the events in a consumer protection case happened in the place where it files suit but can instead file in counties where a defendant has done business.

But Paxton has stretched the boundaries of that law, too, according to legal experts and to former staffers of the attorney general’s office who argued against him in court. Last year, for example, the attorney general filed a lawsuit against the gaming platform Roblox in King County, a ranching community of about 200 people east of Lubbock. Its key justification for selecting the tiny county was that residents there had internet access.

Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment or to written questions, has not spoken publicly about his office’s decisions to file lawsuits in courts with little connection to the cases.

At the November hearing in Panola County, Judge LeAnn Rafferty, a Republican first elected in 2016, did not question the attorney general’s office on its venue choice but asked, “Do you disagree with the defendants’ assertion that Tylenol is the safest choice for pregnant women who have a fever?”

“It depends on — oh, you said for having a fever? That probably is true,” replied J.J. Snidow, a partner at Keller Postman. “There are not alternatives in the pain relief space to Tylenol that don’t also have risks.”

Tylenol makers, Rafferty said, already tell pregnant women to consult with a doctor before taking the drug. Rafferty declined to comment about the case. Snidow said Keller Postman had no comment. Paxton has repeatedly turned to the firm as he has grown increasingly reliant on private attorneys to litigate major cases for his office.

Kenvue directed ProPublica and the Tribune to a statement on its website that said there is “no proven link” between acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and autism. A spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson said the company has had nothing to do with making or selling the drug since splitting with Kenvue in 2023.

Rafferty threw out five of the six claims in the attorney general’s lawsuit. She dismissed one for insufficient evidence. In the other four, Rafferty ruled that the state did not have jurisdiction over Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue Inc. because they do not manufacture or sell Tylenol in Texas.

She allowed one claim to proceed that alleged Kenvue Brands had violated the state’s consumer protection act by making false claims about Tylenol’s safety.

With most of the claims thrown out, the attorney general’s office doubled down on its strategy.

Two weeks later, it filed a new case against the pharmaceutical companies.

This time, it chose Bailey County, a community of 7,000 residents on the New Mexico border.

Paxton’s Pivot

For decades, plaintiffs’ attorneys from across the U.S. swarmed courts in small Texas counties that had reputations for sympathetic judges and generous juries. The practice became so ubiquitous that The Wall Street Journal branded the Texas judicial system a “Wild West embarrassment.”

In 1995, Robert Duncan, then a Republican state representative from Lubbock, resolved to crack down on the practice. He authored a bill that required a “substantial part” of a lawsuit’s claims be connected to the county of filing.

An attorney himself, Duncan recalls traveling hundreds of miles from his home in the Texas High Plains to the Rio Grande Valley for cases that had no connection to the border region. Forum shopping, Duncan told ProPublica and the Tribune, had led to too many attorneys choosing courts where there was “no reason to be there other than the bias or prejudice of whatever the plaintiff’s lawyer is trying to establish that would favor the case, as opposed to giving the defendant a fair opportunity.”

Duncan declined to comment on Paxton’s practice of filing lawsuits in counties with little connection to the allegations of wrongdoing.

Paxton was not in the Legislature when Duncan’s bill passed but, as a freshman representative in 2003, he supported legislation that gave judges more power to dismiss lawsuits they concluded belonged in another state.

He also railed against “rampant forum shopping,” asserting that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 should restrict the practice after plaintiffs in patent infringement lawsuits began flocking to courts that most often ruled in their favor. The Eastern District of Texas had become the most popular venue for the lawsuits, even though few of the cases had clear connections to the area. Most cases landed on the docket of a judge based in rural Harrison County, 140 miles east of Dallas, where plaintiffs won 78% of the time, according to legal researchers.

That waned after justices ruled that federal courts must strictly enforce a decades-old law requiring corporations in patent disputes to be sued only in their home states.

Since then, Paxton has repeatedly engaged in forum shopping in state courts, legal experts said. In fact, his office, or attorneys on behalf of his office, have filed 11 cases in Harrison, the same county where he argued that federal courts should limit plaintiffs from filing.

“It’s hypocritical for the AG to criticize patent litigants for forum shopping but then to forum shop himself,” said Paul Gugliuzza, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “Forum shopping, judge shopping — it’s usually not unlawful, but it is highly opportunistic, and, in many circumstances, probably shouldn’t be lawful.”

Paxton notched one of the biggest wins of his tenure in Harrison County. He secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta after alleging that the Facebook parent company captured Texans’ biometric data without their consent. Paxton’s office contended in court filings that Harrison was a proper venue for the 2022 lawsuit because the company had done business in the county and a substantial part of the alleged lawbreaking occurred there. The office did not provide specifics.

Meta has an office in Travis County, home to Austin, not in Harrison, where only about 0.2% of Texans live, but the company did not challenge the venue. The company didn’t admit to wrongdoing in the settlement and did not respond to questions about the case. It’s unclear why its lawyers did not seek a different venue, but the judge in the case, Republican Brad Morin, denied a transfer in at least one other lawsuit involving Paxton during the Meta litigation.

Paxton has not limited his efforts to find more favorable courts solely to small counties. The attorney general has repeatedly filed cases, particularly political ones, in Tarrant, the state’s largest Republican county and home to Fort Worth.

In August, Paxton’s office chose the county as the venue to sue former Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and his political organization, Powered By People, after the group helped pay expenses for Democratic members of the Texas Legislature who left the state to block the passage of new congressional maps. The maps, drawn at Trump’s behest, favored the GOP.

The attorney general’s office stated in court documents that the case had a “substantial” connection to Tarrant County because the group planned a rally in Fort Worth. When O’Rourke sought to move the case to El Paso County — where he lives and where the group is headquartered — Paxton accused him of forum shopping. O’Rourke did not respond to an interview request.

Paxton secured a court order in Tarrant that prohibited Powered by People from fundraising while the case was pending. But within weeks, the 15th Court of Appeals overturned the decision. It noted that Paxton was a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, which created an incentive to blunt Democrats’ ability to campaign. The judges said the order infringed on the organization’s free speech rights before a court had determined guilt.

Legal experts say such forum shopping erodes trust in the court system. It is especially problematic when it comes from the attorney general, who is supposed to defend state laws and preserve public trust in the justice system, they said.

“It’s hard to respect the system if you think it’s being employed in a way you fundamentally think is unfair,” said Paul Grimm, a former U.S. district judge in Maryland and an advocate of restricting forum shopping.

“Not the Law”

In at least two recent cases, Paxton has tested a novel interpretation of state law governing where lawsuits can be filed. His office has argued that if a company does business over the internet, it can be sued in any Texas county.

One such case was a 2022 lawsuit against pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. Two law firms filed the case against the company under a law that allows private attorneys to sue on behalf of the attorney general. The lawsuit accused AstraZeneca of defrauding Medicaid by giving kickbacks to healthcare workers in exchange for prescribing the company’s products. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, said in legal filings that the lawsuit sought to punish its innocuous outreach to doctors and did not identify a single patient harmed or taxpayer dollar wasted.

Paxton’s office formally joined the case in July. Attorneys working on behalf of his office argued that Harrison County was the proper venue because the firm’s website could be accessed from there, company salespeople had visited the county and a local clinic had a brochure for one of the company’s drugs.

When AstraZeneca asked Morin, the lone Harrison County judge, to transfer the case to Travis County, he refused without explanation. The company appealed and, in November, the 15th Court of Appeals overruled Morin’s decision. The court concluded that he abused his discretion in declining to move the case. Morin did not respond to a request for comment.

The court also found that Paxton’s office failed to provide proof that any of the alleged lawbreaking occurred in Harrison County. It ordered the case transferred to Travis County, where it is ongoing.

That month, the attorney general’s office argued that Roblox could be sued in King County, an expanse of rolling plains with no incorporated communities, because third-party retailers there sold gift cards to access the online gaming company.

Then the office made another bold claim: that companies with websites can be sued anywhere, no matter how small the county.

“This is a case about ubiquity, about being online and accessible to all children throughout the state,” Mark Pinkert, a Florida lawyer whom Paxton’s office had hired as outside counsel, argued at a hearing to discuss a request from Roblox that the case be moved to Travis County. “They are advertising broadly.”

Pinkert did not respond to a request for comment.

Roblox’s attorney Ed Burbach was stunned by the argument. He’d previously led the civil litigation division at the attorney general’s office under Abbott. The office’s longstanding practice, Burbach told the judge, was to file statewide consumer protection cases in Travis County.

This new argument by the attorney general’s office would obliterate the Legislature’s attempts to limit forum shopping by allowing any company to be sued in any county, Burbach said.

“That is simply not the law,” Burbach said, adding that most Texans, including lawmakers, would “be shocked to hear that outside counsel of the AG’s office would be arguing that.”

The judge transferred the case to Travis County, where it is ongoing.

Burbach declined to comment, but Paul Rogers, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, warned of the dangers if Paxton succeeds at getting courts to side with his expansive interpretation. The attorney general, he said, would have “a lot of power to file any lawsuit, in any county, for any reason, whether the underlying lawsuit has merit or not.”

Doubling Down

In Washington, Trump and Kennedy’s public rebukes of Tylenol have tapered off. Paxton, however, continues to vigorously pursue his lawsuit against the drugmakers in state court.

After the setback in Panola County, the attorney general’s office filed an urgent request in Bailey County, arguing that Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue should be barred from selling any products in Texas until they filed paperwork and paid a $750 fee to register with the secretary of state. (Such registration would allow Paxton’s office to strengthen its case in Panola County.)

Though Paxton’s office was already involved in a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical companies in Panola County, the attorney general’s office stated in court filings that it did not know the companies’ attorneys, so it could not notify them of the suit.

Without hearing from the drugmakers’ lawyers, Judge Gordon Green ordered the companies to register. He said they could be barred from doing business in Texas if they didn’t. Paxton proclaimed the ruling a “major win” over Big Pharma.

The victory was short-lived. A week later, the drugmakers’ lawyer Aaron Nielson, who had previously served under Paxton as the state’s solicitor general, attended a hearing in Green’s court. He accused Paxton’s office of sleight of hand by trying to relitigate claims that had already failed to persuade the Panola County judge.

“This is blatant forum shopping and taking another bite at the apple,” said Nielson, who did not respond to a request for comment. “They decided to bring Your Honor into this, rather than let the Court that they chose continue with its own proceedings, which we think is highly improper.”

At the end of the hearing, Green withdrew the order requiring the companies to register. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The Panola and Bailey county cases are awaiting a ruling from the 15th Court of Appeals.

In the meantime, the attorney general’s office tried yet another gambit in Panola, where the judge had allowed one of its original claims to move forward.

Paxton’s lawyers amended their original lawsuit in the county. They noted that Green had ordered the drugmakers to register to do business in Texas, which meant Texas now had jurisdiction to pursue the claims that had been dismissed.

They omitted the fact that Green voided that order.

By referencing the order as if it were still in effect, the attorney general’s office risks losing credibility with the Panola County judge, Gugliuzza said.

“If you knowingly are presenting false information to the court, that is textbook sanctionable conduct,” Gugliuzza said.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

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.

According to correspondence between state and federal officials, DHS has had to correct information provided to at least five states after SAVE misidentified some voters as noncitizens.

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 order triggered a series of meetings at USCIS designed to comply with a 30-day deadline to remake SAVE, a document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and reviewed by ProPublica shows.

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, noncitizens rarely 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.”

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.

The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.

According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated.

Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.

Incorporating driver’s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don’t include voters’ Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver’s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It is the key that unlocks everything,” Morse said.

State driver’s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.

Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver’s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn’t linked to live versions of state driver’s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.

“This could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,” Orey said.

DHS says in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, “will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”

The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.

Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants’ citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.

Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be “shared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.

Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.

Some privacy lawyers called DHS’ move to add driver’s license information more evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE’s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn’t happen in this case.

In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.

Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the “evolution” of SAVE into a “one-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.”

“That would require collaboration with each states’ DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,” Benz wrote.

Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license division, replied that DPS is “always happy” to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.

It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the “department does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.”

She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state’s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.

The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.

At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,” Davis’ filing says.