If you are naturalized or derived U.S. citizen, you may want to check your Social Security citizenship status. SCOTUS may just have disenfranchised thousands of us.

The U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that the Trump administration can use a wide-ranging government database that includes Social Security information to help state officials identify noncitizens on their voter lists. This ruling will almost certainly disenfranchise untold thousands of naturalized and derived U.S. citizens, almost all of them will have no idea until they show up at the polls (or, perhaps even worse, their mail ballots will be discarded without their knowledge.) Why is that? Naturalized citizens are Americans who applied for and where granted U.S. citizenship as adult Green Card holders. There is a process to update their citizenship status with the Social Security Administration, but many new citizens don’t follow it, because it’s basically unnecessary. They can still get U.S. passports and, crucially, they can still register to vote. Their Social Security benefits stay the same. But NOW, for the first time, they may be told (on election day!) that they can’t vote. (Or they may not be told at all and never realize their votes were discarded.) The situation is even worse for derived citizens, who are Americans who automatically became U.S. citizens as children when th…

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