Secretary of State describes SAVE pilot that flagged 42 potential non‑citizen votes and recounts voter‑look‑up outage fix
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Summary
The Secretary of State told the committee Tennessee piloted federal SAVE system improvements to bulk‑check voter rolls; a bulk check flagged 42 possible non‑U.S. citizens among 4,000,000 records, most later explained by derived‑citizen or data issues; the office also fixed a voter lookup GIS outage after lawmakers alerted staff.
The Secretary of State’s office updated the committee on election systems and voter integrity work, including a pilot with the federal SAVE system that now allows bulk comparisons between state voter rolls and federal records.
The office said it uploaded roughly 4,000,000 voter records and identified 42 individuals initially flagged as potential non‑U.S. citizens. The Secretary’s office said many of those initial flags were attributable to data issues (including derived citizenship and discrepancies that the enhanced SAVE logic corrected) and that the state followed the statutory notification process giving flagged registrants 30 days to provide proof of citizenship. The office said the enhanced bulk‑check capability is now available nationwide after the pilot.
Secretary staff also described a recently fixed voter‑lookup outage: an alternate GIS lookup hosted by Finance and Administration had an incomplete file that omitted several counties; the omission was corrected after legislators alerted the office.
The Secretary reiterated that Tennessee election law still relies on photo identification for in‑person voting and that proposed bills would allow front‑end citizenship checks if federal tools and rules enable that functionality.
Committee members discussed whether a small number of flagged registrations could affect tight local races; Secretary staff said in a review of contested races the flags did not change outcomes in the examples they checked.
