this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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  • Widespread Errors: An expanded federal tool for identifying noncitizens on voter rolls is making persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing citizenship for people born outside the U.S.
  • Banned From Voting: In Missouri, state officials told local clerks to temporarily ban flagged voters from casting ballots, even though hundreds turned out to be citizens.
  • Texas Confusion: As errors emerged in SAVE data, local clerks said the state hadn’t provided them with clear guidance and worried about disenfranchising eligible citizens.
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[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 5 points 31 minutes ago

'Accident'. 🙄

[–] amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world 1 points 26 minutes ago

Isn't that the point? Ensure there aren't that many voters? I'd say it works as I tended.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 18 points 4 hours ago

As designed.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago

Extra mistakes in blue states I’m sure.

[–] Ghostie@lemmy.zip 9 points 5 hours ago

“Mistakenly”. Bugs are the kind of things that can easily explain away intent to mess stuff up.

[–] starblursd@lemmy.zip 13 points 6 hours ago

"mistakenly" flags democrat registered voters? I can only assume

"It's only rigged when we lose" - maga

[–] gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 6 hours ago

That was always the plan

[–] darthsundhaft@piefed.social 5 points 6 hours ago

They're probably using AI...

[–] Armand1@lemmy.world 36 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Given that only 22 noncitizens over the course of like 10 years (can't remember the exact statistic) tried to vote, the way to get the best accuracy would be to just hard code the answer to "yes, they can vote". Then you get over 99.99% accuracy.

[–] pageflight@piefed.social 15 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

From the article:

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.

[–] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I'm not even sure what incentive they would have. We already have a huge problem with citizens not voting because they think their vote won't change anything. Is anyone going to think "I'm going to risk going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for me to spend my free time filling out a ballot box which will have a 0.000001% chance of having any effect"?

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 17 points 8 hours ago

"Mistakenly"

[–] Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works 8 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

So if it says I can't vote because win not a us citizen and my state bans me from voting for it, am I off the hook on taxes?

No taxation without representation, right?

[–] dan1101@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

Logically yes, but these are not logical times.

[–] CobraChicken3000@lemmy.ca 128 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

It's a feature, not a bug.

[–] Virtvirt588@lemmy.world 45 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

This is how political cleansing begins. Once the system is turned on, voting for anything slightly left will cast you as a criminal of the state.

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 22 points 11 hours ago

Certainly they won't use years of collected metadata from social networks about political sentiment, right? ...right?

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 13 points 10 hours ago

This has happened all over there US already. Someone challenges your right to vote and it's your job to prove your eligibility. Can't show up to your appointment? No ID? No bills going to that address? Only have a PO Box address? No voting for you!

[–] danekrae@lemmy.world 8 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

And still, americans believe the democrats will win... Even after everything in the past, everything being said in the present, they're still only going to protest.

[–] ruekk@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

What do you want Americans to do? Start an open insurrection? Do you really realize how many thousand of people would die the instant a semi-armed civilian led force tried to fight back?

[–] gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

People want them to do literally anything at all

The perception is you're taking it lying down

[–] Tehbaz@lemmy.wtf 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

It's a case of die standing up or on your knees in a 'big beautiful' concentration camp. A peaceful general strike and spending boycott would be a start, but nobody seems to be willing to make that sacrifice until it's too late.

[–] Attacker94@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

What do you mean by spending boycott, if your thinking about the corporations that are enabling this administration I can agree on sentiment but not on effectiveness, the involved corporations are already propped up by nonexistent money, removing the real money won't have any noticeable effects other than accelerating the economic collapse, which I will grant you is not necessarily a bad play, but it is not quite as cut and dry.

If you are talking about tax evasion, I would highly doubt that that would end well, especially with the propaganda machine in full swing

[–] KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

I'm genuinely losing my mind at this take. For the last 13 months we've seen thousands of human people walked to their death -- watched planes of human beings take off and return empty; and still half of the comments I see that suggest taking action beyond peaceful marches and waiting for the 2026 midterms get this "smarter than thou" smug response from people, some claiming to be 50501 liberals. Sometimes it's, like, 15 lines and a song quote; with the occasional ALL CAPS "DO NOT TAKE THE BAIT".

People are dying, folks; now. Come to reality. A clash with ICE, especially in the first months when they were untrained and barely armed, wouldn't have accelerated anything--because we didn't have that and yet we are here. This mythical "Insurrection Act" invocation wouldn't have caused the terrorism we are witnessing now; nor the deployments in LA or Portland. Yes, people will die in clashes with the state; but what's the alternative? Letting people die in raids from the state? We watched camera footage with video of pro-Palestinian activists getting disappeared. We've seen masked agents killing hundreds of people across the states, every month. We've seen them raid neighborhoods, and pull people into vans. We've seen our police watch, do nothing, then arrest the bystanders for "causing a disturbance". Every. Day.

The part of me that is clinging onto some partial hope in human nature wants to blame this widespread passivity propaganda for the reason it took a year to have the resistance effort in Minneapolis, which there had been nothing like until that point. Really, though, I sense the real reason behind these arguments and the wider inaction, is that the targets of ICE have been predominantly people of color, and mainly Hispanic folks. So, too, were the kids in cages through the first Trump and Biden administrations.

I understand that Holocaust poem in a depth that I just didn't understand before. I understand the Holocaust documentaries and testimonies I've watched in a depth I hadn't gotten before.

You aren't outsmarting the Republicans by standing back as they kill thousands; tens-of-thousands; hundreds-of-thousands of people of color. You're giving them exactly what they wanted: A “second American Revolution”; [white]-bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

[–] ruekk@lemmy.world -1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

You aren't outsmarting the Republicans by standing back as they kill thousands; tens-of-thousands; hundreds-of-thousands of people of color. You're giving them exactly what they wanted: A “second American Revolution”; [white]-bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

Nor would blindly killing the Repubs/Nazis. All it will do is start a massive killing frenzy. A killing frenzy the government wants and is trying to provoke

[–] KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 45 minutes ago

As I said in my comment, the killing frenzy is here. This government has become more emboldened than ever in oppressing and brutalizing us citizens because they've been taking slow steps toward fascism for decades. The War on Drugs; Bush v. Gore; The Patriot Act; the reporters of Ferguson; Trump's first term executive order overreach; the fucking Insurrection—This year: DOGE; ICE; CECOT; Tariff War; Plus we're just now seeing everything in the Epstein files which was happening as well for decades.

Decades of peaceful protesting and it hasn't worked. We've only been losing ground. 2015's gay marriage decision was a fluke; and the Affordable Care Act was more of a duct-tape fix than true reform.

We've had two real assassinations in the USA: Brian Thompson in December 2024, and Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Do you think the government wanted either of those? Judging from the bipartisan condemnation, absolutely not. Folks like me are not saying to mow down a red state neighborhood. We're saying to resist the ICE deployments, physically, when they show up.

You're right that the US government wants a killing frenzy. It's the one they are enacting, every day of the majority of this term. Even if Republicans' intent in disappearing these tens-of-thousands, maybe hundreds-of-thousands of people is to bait a reaction from people, what is the alternative? We... let tens of thousands of human beings get disappeared? The dehumanization of these victims is sickening and yet it continues to be perpetuated by "holier than thou" liberals who either don't realize what they're suggesting, or don't care.

So, let's say no one does anything in retaliation. Why wouldn't they just make shit up? Well.. the answer is, they have. We've got Stephen Miller on FOX ranting about how blue cities were littered with "body after body after body" under Biden; talking about how Portland would burn to the ground every night. It's all lies. They lie. We know they lie. Their biggest ally, big tech, spent billions of dollars over the last several years making machines that fake evidence and gaslight people. The White house has used AI-generated images and videos to humiliate activists and produce propaganda.

IF we ever claw back our nation from fascism, and that is a big IF, scholars will ask why no one did anything—how this could happen with the open internet, a tool believed to be able to mitigate and prevent the rise of fascism. This constant fearmongering about the "Insurrection Act" and insistence to not react is a significant part of that answer, and I will preach that to the grave.

[–] LemmyBruceLeeMarvin@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 hours ago

"mistakenly"

[–] codapine@lemmy.zip 4 points 7 hours ago

Task failed successfully.

[–] infinitevalence@discuss.online 42 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

thats the whole point, oops, you cant vote, sucks you were voting against us anyway....

[–] VivianRixia@piefed.social 1 points 11 hours ago

But also, oops, you cant vote, sucks that you were going to vote for us anyway

[–] rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 hours ago

That's ok, so does the government

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 1 points 6 hours ago

When it's not working, it's working.

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 15 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Turns out, they were just using this meme as their requirements document.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 hours ago

You know how satire works, right? It's based on existing reality.

[–] TwodogsFighting@lemdro.id 11 points 11 hours ago

"Mistakes".

Cue Ron Howard voiceover.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Repeatedly checking the tool results in massive numbers of mistakes.

If you check the same person twice, the odds of a false positive increase exponentially.

[–] LibertyLizard@quokk.au 6 points 11 hours ago

It's almost like there's almost zero non-citizens voting or something...

Not that there's even a need to prevent them from voting.

[–] dhork@lemmy.world 10 points 12 hours ago

Voting Blue? No Vote For You!

[–] Rhoeri@piefed.social 5 points 12 hours ago

As it was intended to do.