So let me get this straight. A DOGE employee at the Social Security Administration had the audacity — the sheer, unforgivable audacity — to cross-reference government databases with state voter rolls to find out if dead people and illegal aliens are voting in our elections. And Democrats are treating this like someone detonated a nuclear warhead inside the Capitol.
You’d think these people just caught someone trying to sneak a copy of the Constitution into a public school. The shrieking is absolutely unhinged.
Here’s the backstory. A billionaire named Antonio Gracias — one of Elon Musk’s old buddies from the PayPal days — was embedded at SSA as part of the DOGE team. The Social Security Administration pays out roughly $1.5 trillion in benefits to more than 70 million people every year, so naturally there might be a few discrepancies worth looking into. (You think?)
Gracias and his crew started poking around in SSA databases and — hold onto your hat — found what he described as “5-plus million” non-citizens who “came to the country as illegals” and received Social Security numbers “through an automatic system.” Then, just because they were feeling frisky, they checked whether any of those folks happened to be registered to vote.
They found thousands. Many had voted.
A DOGE staffer also signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with True the Vote, the election integrity group run by Catherine Engelbrecht. Democrats are reacting to this the way a vampire reacts to garlic. Rep. Joe Morelle clutched his pearls hard enough to crack them and declared that “sensitive personal information provided to the government should never be used for political reasons.”
Really, Joe? You mean like the IRS targeting conservative non-profits under Obama? Like the FBI raiding a former president’s home and getting authorized to shoot his family? Like every three-letter agency in Washington spending four years trying to throw Trump in prison over a paperwork dispute? That kind of “political use” of government data? Funny how “data privacy” only becomes a sacred principle when someone’s checking whether illegal aliens are casting ballots.
The whistleblower behind all this pearl-clutching is a guy named Charles Borges, who served as SSA’s “chief data officer” (whatever that means) for a whopping seven months before bailing last August. Borges ran straight to NPR — because of course he did — and breathlessly declared this was “exactly the scenario that kept me up at night.”
Dramatic stuff, Chuck. Except nobody’s personal data got “lost.” What happened is that government employees used government data to check whether government voter rolls contained people who shouldn’t be on them. That’s not a scandal. That’s called doing your job for the first time in forty years.
Now here’s where it gets really fun. A federal judge in Maryland named Ellen Hollander — an Obama appointee, naturally — had issued a temporary restraining order on March 20th blocking DOGE from accessing SSA data. The voter data agreement was signed on March 24th. Four days later. Democrats are acting like this is Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Rosenbergs all rolled into one delicious scandal burrito.
Judge Hollander described DOGE’s work as “a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.” She said they were searching for “the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
Well, Your Honor, Gracias went on Fox & Friends and said they found thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls who had actually voted. That’s not a needle in a haystack. That’s finding out the entire haystack is made of needles and they’ve all been casting ballots in Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court apparently agreed, because by June they reversed Hollander’s restraining order and restored DOGE’s access to the data. (Funny how that part didn’t get the breathless NPR treatment. Borges must have been napping.)
Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded full voter rolls from at least 44 states and is suing 25 of them — mostly Democrat-run, in a coincidence so shocking it could knock you right off your chair — for refusing to hand them over. “Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” Bondi said. I know, I know. Totally crazy talk.
Sen. Ron Wyden called the whole thing “one of the largest known data breaches in American history.” Ron, buddy. The OPM hack in 2015 under your boy Obama exposed the personal data of 21.5 million federal employees to Chinese hackers. That was a data breach. This is a guy opening an Excel file and comparing two columns. Calm down.
The Campaign Legal Center — one of those “nonpartisan” outfits that just happens to side with Democrats on literally everything, every single time, without exception — whined that the government’s efforts are “really designed not to chase down conspiracy theories about election fraud.”
“Conspiracy theories.” Five million non-citizens with Social Security numbers. Thousands of them on voter rolls. Many of them voted. But sure, it’s all a big conspiracy theory. I guess all those people just accidentally registered to vote while applying for benefits they weren’t supposed to have in the first place. Oopsie!
We all know what’s really going on here. Democrats have spent decades fighting every single effort to verify the accuracy of voter rolls. Voter ID? Racist. Purging dead people? Voter suppression. Cross-referencing databases to find illegal voters? “Data breach!” It’s almost like they’re running the same play from the same playbook every time someone gets close to the cookie jar.
Prediction: when DOGE and the DOJ finally get through all 50 states’ voter rolls, the number of non-citizens registered to vote is going to make five million look like a rounding error. And every single Democrat who screamed “conspiracy theory” is going to suddenly develop amnesia. We’ve seen this movie before — it’s a rerun, and we already know the ending.
—