Facebook post wrong about SSA data
A social media user took to Facebook to spread the word about what he claims is documented evidence of voter fraud.
“Show your Democrat friend this post when they claim voter fraud doesn’t occur,” read the April 2 Facebook post. “From the Federal Social Security website (link below), you can see how many people each of the 43 states are registering to vote who DO NOT HAVE IDs.”
The post included a screengrab of a spreadsheet and a link to a Social Security Administration webpage.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.
The linked page showed the Social Security Administration’s “Weekly Data for Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) Transactions by State January 2011 to Present Totals.”
However, this data wasn’t what the post promised.
Rather than showing how many people have registered to vote without IDs, the table’s data reflects the number of times a state requested information from a Social Security Administration system used to verify voters’ identities.
The Help America Vote Verification System
Under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, state election officials must verify new voters’ information. States can do this by verifying a voter’s driver’s license number against the state’s Motor Vehicle Administration’s database or, in cases in which the voter does has no driver’s license, verifying the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number.
In response to the 2002 law, the Social Security Administration set up the Help America Vote Verification system, sometimes called the HAVV system.
Today, the Social Security Administration reports that 43 states use this system to verify a person’s name, birth date and last four Social Security number digits. The table the post linked to tracks states’ requests for four-digit matches from January 2011 on. It shows how many have been processed, how many could not be processed, how many yielded matches and how many weren’t matched. The data does not reflect numbers of people, let alone people registered to vote.
Sean Morales-Doyle, who directs the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said it is inaccurate to claim the table shows how many people states have registered to vote without IDs.
“The fact that a state is verifying the last four digits of a registrant’s Social Security number does not mean that that person registered to vote without an ID,” he said.
Federal law requires that people registering to vote in a federal election provide a driver’s license number, a state ID number, the last four digits of a Social Security number or check a box saying they have none of those things, Morales-Doyle said.
On some states’ voter registration forms, voters who have IDs and Social Security numbers could simply choose to fill in the Social Security number because it’s a number they have memorized, he said. Filling out that section of the application does not in itself mean the applicants lack IDs.
States can also repeatedly request verifications on the same person’s Social Security number.
In a 2010 audit of the Social Security Administration system, the inspector general’s office found that during fiscal year 2008, 32% of transactions submitted by 25 states “related to the same voter data being re-submitted 10 or more times.”
Ohio, for example, “submitted the same voter information 1,778 times during the year for a 77-year-old man who died in December 2005,” the audit found.
The Social Security Administration’s press office did not immediately respond to our questions about the data.
Officials in multiple states rebut this claim
Responding to claims misrepresenting the Social Security Administration’s data, election officials in Arizona, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin said that the data does not show millions of people registering to vote without IDs.
Although the system was developed to verify identities when people lack driver’s license numbers, MoralesDoyle said, “That doesn’t actually mean that every time someone is being run through this system it’s because they just registered and they don’t have a driver’s license number.”
The data contains no specific information about whether the people registering had photo IDs.
“In Pennsylvania, the Department of State uses the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) to check partial social security numbers (SSN) not only for voter registration applications, but also for absentee and mail ballot applications,” Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson Ellen Lyon told PolitiFact.
Robert Kehoe, a Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator, said that the state’s data as it appears on the Social Security Administration’s website reflects that a voter registered without providing a state ID or driver’s license number. Wisconsin voter registrations are verified using Wisconsin Department of Transportation data or, if an ID number is unavailable, using Social Security number verification.
JP Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona’s secretary of state, told PolitiFact that 90% of verification of citizenship proof is done through the Motor Vehicles Division in Arizona, not through the Social Security Administration.
This isn’t the first time this data has been used to amplify unsupported claims of supposed voter fraud by noncitizens. We’ve similar statements from conservative internet influencers, former President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk and rated them False.
Fraudulent voter registration and voting by noncitizens is rare and usually happens because of a misunderstanding or a mistake. (Voting by noncitizens carries high risks that include deportation or incarceration.) Nevertheless, politicians including Trump and his allies have continuously spread false claims about rampant fraudulent voting by noncitizens.
Not all people without IDs are noncitizens. One 2023 survey found that almost 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have valid, unexpired driver’s licenses.
And, someone registering to vote does not mean a vote was cast, said Cassondra Knudson, a spokesperson for Minnesota’s Secretary of State. Election officials have several layers of verification to ensure only eligible voters cast ballots.
Our ruling
A social media post claimed data on the Social Security Administration’s website showed “how many people each of the 43 states are registering to vote who DO NOT HAVE IDs.”
That’s inaccurate: It shows the results of requests from 43 states to verify partial Social Security numbers under the Help America Vote Act. Sometimes states verify the same voter’s information multiple times, and not all verification requests are for voters registering without IDs.
We rate this claim False.
PolitiFact Staff Writer Sofia Ahmed and PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.