David Levine is the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, where he assesses vulnerabilities in electoral infrastructure, administration, and policies. Previously, he worked as the Ada County, Idaho Elections Director, managing the administration of all federal, state, county, and local district elections.
Last month, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a new system, the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID) that he said would improve the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls by comparing the state’s voter registration information to the state’s driver’s license database, the National Change of Address File, the Social Security Death Index, and voter lists of five other states. Sound like a product worth building? The good news is that someone has already tested the concept and shown it works. The bad news -- that same entity is the interstate compact for sharing voter registration that Allen left immediately upon assuming office – the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
Allen touted the security of AVID by stressing that voter information would be housed on a server in Alabama, and that the state would get information directly from its own agencies and other states directly, rather than through a third party. While noteworthy, neither of these measures offers strong assurances about the security of AVID.
More important for AVID is how Alabama’s voter information will be stored and transmitted.
When Alabama was part of ERIC, its voter information was kept in one central location with all the other ERIC member states. Now, Alabama has memorandums of understanding to share voter information with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, and is looking to make similar agreements with more states. That means that there will be many more connections for Alabama to monitor to ensure that its voters’ information is not compromised, a potential threat that is not merely abstract.
In 2005, the Kansas Secretary of State initiated a voter registration program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck (IVRC) with Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska that combined each state’s voter rolls into a database and sought to identify whether voters in different states voted in the same election. By 2014, the program had expanded to twenty-nine states. Unfortunately, IVRC had inadequate data security protocols in place that contributed to the accidental disclosure of sensitive, personal information for 1,000 Kansas voters in 2018, raising potential concerns about these voters being subjected to identity theft, foreign interference, and other forms of tampering.
Close attention will also need to be paid to how Alabama’s voter information is stored, particularly since data storage practices vary from state to state. ERIC addresses data storage by not possessing the raw data of sensitive, personally identifiable information, such as date of birth, social security numbers, or driver’s license numbers. Instead, that information is “hashed” by states before it is sent to ERIC as a string of characters that is not human readable or decodable. Then ERIC hashes it again, so that even the states cannot reconstitute the records. Alabama isn’t naïve to preparing and securely transmitting data, but neither were other states who recently engaged in similar efforts without success.
Another potential concern with AVID is whether it will be as helpful as ERIC. For example, when Alabama was part of ERIC from 2016 through early 2022, ERIC identified more than 19,000 voter records of potentially deceased Alabama voters, and 98% of those voter records were subsequently removed from Alabama’s voter rolls. One big reason for this success was because Alabama’s voter list was compared to the voter lists of more than half of the other states, along with those states’ driver’s licensing data, the National Change of Address File, and the Social Security Death Index. It is hard to see how a system with five states can provide the same quality of information as one with twenty-five.
AVID will hopefully help improve the accuracy of Alabama’s voter rolls, but it is far from a certainty, particularly ahead of 2024.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.