DOGE is coming for your voter information

Places like Georgia, where Republicans are passing a new election denial bill, will welcome DOGE's infiltration of voter registration data.

It was another crazy week ,so here are the stories of mine from the past few days that you might have missed.

• Former Social Security Chief Courts Florida Seniors Enraged by Musk’s Cuts - Rolling Stone

• Trump's Social Security nominee in coordination with DOGE - Doom

• New executive order is everything election deniers want - Doom

• Why DOGE Having Your Social Security Data Is Dangerous - Rolling Stone

If you want to support my work staying on top of all the authoritarian efforts of the Trump administration and Republicans who continue to push election denialism, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom. You can also throw a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.

Now, onto the news…

***

An election denial bill pushed by Georgia Republicans cleared a major hurdle this week, and will head toward passage just as the legislative session comes to a close on Friday.

The bill, HB 397, will also reduce the ability of Georgia voters to drop off absentee ballots. It also requires the state to stop participating with organizations like Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to conduct maintenance of voter rolls and ensure that ineligible voters aren’t registered to vote. Republican states overwhelmed by pressure from the election denial movement have successfully convinced (often woefully uninformed) state lawmakers to leave ERIC in recent years. The organization, which is funded by member-states who participate, helps secretaries of state and other election officials “clean” voter rolls.

Election officials from both parties have praised ERIC for helping them to maintain the most up-to-date voter rolls as possible — “list maintenance” that both complies with laws like the National Voter Registration Act and largely avoids wrongfully disenfranchising large swaths of voters. To replace ERIC, election deniers in red states have proposed state-to-state agreements that, again, Democratic and Republican election officials have said aren’t as effective as ERIC itself.

Worse, the election denial movement has been successful, in some cases, of instituting ERIC replacements that are run by election denialists, like the failed EagleAI program in Georgia — basically a crowdsourced effort to try to kick Democrats off voter rolls over flawed misunderstandings of how voter registration works or outright targeting of voters in largely Black precincts.

In a bit of a preview of what this might look like in Georgia and other states going forward, the Trump administration’s new executive order on elections seeks to give the Justice Department, DHS and even DOGE what experts say are unconstitutional roles in removing ineligible voters from state registration databases.

In other words, DOGE is coming for state voter registration data and some states like Georgia might let them have it, if the election denial movement gets its way.

***

There’s been a lot of drama in Georgia over the last week as groups have been fighting over HB 397’s particulars. Republicans have offered up several different versions of the bill, including one released just hours before it was to be discussed at a committee hearing. It’s likely that the state’s election denial movement — led by people like Garland Favorito of VoterGA and Dr. Janice Johnston, an election extremist still serving on the State Election Board — had a very heavy, albeit unseen, hand in the bill’s provisions.

The extremist ideology of people like Favorito and Johnston probably has something to do with both the sloppiness of some of the bill’s language and the last-minute back-and-forth that was taking place even as committee hearings neared.

HB 397 is just the latest in a long, long line of pushes by Georgia’s powerful election denial movement — led in no small part by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who would very much like to be governor of the Peach State — and largely opposed by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The secretary sent two deputies to speak at a hearing on HB 397, specifically opposing provisions that would require the hand-counting of ballots at precincts on election night and the requirement that Georgia leave ERIC.

More Doom on denialism

• Nearly 300 local officials across U.S. support Trump's election lies. Here's what you can do about it.

• Pro-Trump swing state election officials poised to deny November’s election results

• Extremists in Georgia have manhandled elections here

• Pennsylvania is teeming with election denial officials

• Election denial activists force rules upon Georgia voters with impunity

In the hearing, Raffensperger’s representatives pointed out that having state-to-state agreements to perform voter list maintenance has ended up being more expensive for states who have done so after leaving ERIC. Meanwhile, several county election supervisors from across Georgia — including some very conservative parts of the state — testified in opposition to the bill’s requirement that poll workers compare the number of ballots with the number of votes cast, by hand, at precincts on election night.

This would cause chaos and delay the tabulation of results, further fueling election denial conspiracies. Speaking of those, the Trump-backing State Election Board, comprised of three members chosen specifically for their belief in election lies, is given a lot more power under HB 397. More on that later, but for now you should know that future elections in Georgia will continue to be the subject of denialist scrutiny from the SEB, which will seek to insert itself into the tallying of results and will openly call any results that don’t show a Republican win into question. This bill potentially sets us up for at least another few years’ worth of chaos around Georgia elections.

Here’s a couple other things that I wanted to get out for this roundup before next week bludgeons us with more news.

• Some of the pressure is working - Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled, a group that advocates for Social Security recipients and the disabled, notched a win when it helped to convince acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), Leland Dudek, to abandon plans to have disabled and ill people prove their identities in person by visiting field offices. This plan was briefly a part of DOGE’s brilliant work making the SSA more efficient, which increasingly looks like — shocker! — it is actually, what’s the term here that I’m looking for? Oh yeah, fucking things up. But never one to let mistakes, incompetence and a complete lack of technical skill get in his way, Elon Musk and his DOGE crew are plowing forward through government agencies, bringing me to my next point

• The list-making and lying has begun in earnest - In their appearance with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Musk and some of his DOGE deputies alleged that a baby received a Small Business Administration loan, which is almost certainly a lie or some misunderstanding on their part. Even if it is one hundred percent true, it’s an absurd mistake that should have been caught but wasn’t because “the systems aren’t talking to each other,” according to Musk. But don’t worry, he has a plan for that. This little tale — which, again, Musk nor DOGE have provided any actual evidence of — is a great example of a government screw-up based on data and information that Musk and the administration will use to justify Trump’s “Information Silos” executive order from last week. But things like this baby-SBA loan is not why Trump and Musk want to remove rules and procedures prohibiting the completely uninhibited sharing of data across government agencies. They want to remove those rules and procedures — checks built into the system that include things like the Privacy Act — because this is a massive data-gathering operation, and they are gathering the data for the purposes of identifying their enemies.

  Want to scroll more Doom? Why not:

  • Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social

  • TikTok - @americandoom_

  • YouTube - @americandoom_

  • Instagram - @americandoom_

  • X - @americandoom_

  • Facebook