Secretary Raffensperger Applauds DHS Action on Georgia-Led Effort to Protect American Citizen Only Voting

Secretary of State Press Office
214 State Capitol
Atlanta, GA 30334
Contact: 470-312-2803

Atlanta - Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger applauded the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for implementing critical updates to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program – changes that reflect the recommendations made by Raffensperger earlier this year.

In a February letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Raffensperger urged the department to expand SAVE’s functionality to better support state efforts to verify citizenship for voter registration and list maintenance.

“I’m proud to see DHS implementing the exact improvements we called for,” said Secretary Raffensperger. “Georgia continues to lead the nation in secure, fair, and accurate elections. This new bulk verification tool will make it easier to keep our voter rolls clean, while still protecting every eligible voter's rights.”

Following Executive Order 14248, USCIS has announced that it is launching a bulk upload capability within the SAVE program. This new tool will allow state election offices to submit multiple voter verification cases at once. This streamlines the previously manual process and reduces delays for election officials working to maintain accurate rolls.

This update directly addresses recommendations made in Raffensperger’s letter, including: the Implementing of batch processing for SAVE cases, expanding the types of identifiers allowed in verification requests (initially Alien Numbers or Naturalization Certificate Numbers, with plans to include Social Security Numbers), and waiving transaction fees for voter registration and voter list maintenance use cases.

“The integrity of our elections relies on both accurate voter lists and respect for the rule of law,” Raffensperger added. “These updates ensure that both are upheld. I thank DHS for listening to states like Georgia and taking meaningful action.”

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Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections. It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 17 days of early voting (which has been called the “gold standard”), and no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia continues to set records for voter turnout and election participation, seeing the largest increase in average turnout of any other state in the 2018 midterm election and record turnout in 2020, and 2022. 2022 achieved the largest single day of in-person early voting turnout in Georgia midterm history utilizing Georgia’s secure, paper ballot voting system. Most recently, Georgia ranked #2 for Election Integrity by the Heritage Foundation, a top ranking for Voter Accessibility by the Center for Election Innovation & Research and tied for number one in Election Administration by the Bipartisan Policy Center.