Supreme Court Revives Controversial Citizenship Data System
The Dividend of Suspicion
Someone is being paid for a suspicion. The currency is not money but authority: the standing that accrues to officials who can say they have searched the rolls, and the political credit that flows to those who warned the search was necessary. What service, precisely, does this payment purchase for the society that provides it? The Supreme Court of the United States, in reviving a controversial federal data system for checking the citizenship of voters, has not answered that question. It has only permitted the payment to resume.
What is any public apparatus for? The question sounds naive, and that is why it is so rarely asked. A tax office exists to raise revenue, a court to settle disputes, a register of citizens to establish who may claim the protection and obligations of membership. Each is legitimate so far as it performs its function, and each becomes something else when it continues to exact its costs after the function has become incidental. The history of institutions is full of such survivals. Offices outlive their duties. Fees outlive their services. Titles outlive the obligations that once justified them. The eighteenth-century sinecurist drew his salary for a post whose work had disappeared a generation earlier, and nobody thought it strange, because the salary had become a form of property and property was not expected to explain itself.
The strongest case for the system deserves to be stated plainly, because it is not contemptible. The franchise belongs to citizens. A vote cast by someone not entitled to it cancels a vote cast by someone who is, and the cancelled voter is injured though they never learn it. A state that keeps records of citizenship and declines to consult them when compiling its electoral rolls would seem to be neglecting an obvious duty. On this view the system is not functionless at all. It performs the most elementary service a democracy owes its members, which is to count only those who belong.
I accept every premise of that argument and reject its conclusion, because it proves the legitimacy of the end without proving the legitimacy of the instrument. Function is not established by naming a worthy purpose. It is established by showing that the arrangement actually serves that purpose in proportion to what it costs, and that the costs fall on those who benefit. Here the facts are against the apparatus. The allegation that non-citizens vote in meaningful numbers is disputed, and the dispute is not a quibble at the margins; it goes to whether the thing being hunted exists at a scale that could justify the hunt. Meanwhile the instrument itself draws on sensitive citizenship records assembled for other purposes, records that were never designed to be a live census of the electorate and that record a person’s status at one moment rather than their status now.
Consider who bears the error. Not the official who runs the check, nor the campaigner who demanded it. The burden falls on a woman who took her oath of citizenship years ago, whose record in some federal file still describes the person she was before the ceremony, and who learns at a county clerk’s counter that her name has been flagged. She has her naturalisation certificate in a plastic sleeve, because she has been told to keep it safe. She is now asked to produce it, to prove a membership already granted, while the queue behind her lengthens and the clerk, who is not unkind, explains that the system is only doing its job.
That phrase is the whole difficulty. The system is doing a job, but not the one advertised. Its product is not the removal of ineligible voters, who by the account of its critics are rare, but the generation of doubt about eligible ones, and doubt is a commodity with a ready market. Every flag produces a report; every report can be cited as evidence of a problem; every citation strengthens the case for further searching. It is an enterprise that manufactures its own demand, which in commerce we would call a racket and in government we have learned to call vigilance.
The acquisitive society made the error of treating accumulation as its own justification. A politics of suspicion makes the same error with authority. It gathers powers of inspection because gathering them feels like diligence, and it will go on gathering them long after anyone can say what they were for.
Somewhere in the country a clerk is photocopying a certificate that proves what everyone in the room already knew, and filing it in a folder marked as a success.