NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Early voting in Tennessee started Wednesday.
And while a recent Supreme Court decision will not affect who gets to vote in this election, President Trump hopes it will change things in future elections.
That ruling cleared the way for states to resume using the Trump administration's controversial voter identification tool.
Here's what this means for Tennessee, one of the first states to use it.
Back in July, President Donald Trump once again insisted, without any sort of proof, that too many non-citizens are voting in U.S. elections.
"If you look at voting today, it's in such bad shape in so many states," Trump suggested.
It's been a common theme of his. And it's why he issued an executive order last year, announcing a new tool to identify non-citizens who had voted and to make sure they didn't vote again.
The SAVE or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements tool uses data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security and other records to verify the citizenship and immigration status of registered voters.
"I've also ordered DHS to notify every state about non-citizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately," the president announced during that same briefing he held in July.
And while Trump has pressed his administration to find evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens, the problem, it turns out, is not really a problem.
"In terms of U.S. election administration, in terms of eligible voters voting, it's a pretty sound system," Dr Sekou Franklin told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
Franklin is a Fisk University political science professor and is heavily involved with both voting and civil rights groups in Tennessee.
"You have a better chance of probably getting hit by lightning than you have a massive voter fraud in the way that President Trump talks about," Franklin explained.
Yet, some states, including Tennessee, immediately embraced the SAVE technology.
Last October, Secretary of State Tre Hargett tweeted a photo of a letter he'd received from President Trump, thanking him "for using...SAVE..."and being "one of the first to step up and protect the integrity of elections."
And Hargett touted in a press release how his office had "referred to the FBI the names of 42 people the SAVE system had identified as potential non-U-S citizens who had voted," promising "possible enforcement action," pointing out that "voter fraud is a felony with serious consequences."
So it's now a year after that announcement and we wanted to know how many of those 42 people turned out to actually be non-citizens, how many had been removed from the voter registration rolls, and how many had actually been prosecuted for voting illegally.
So we followed up with the Secretary of State's office but the staff refused to tell us.
But the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville confirmed that no one has been charged in the last year with illegal voting while court records show no one in East or West Tennessee has been charged either.
And the Davidson County Election Commission told NewsChannel 5 Investigates no non-citizens have been removed from the voting rolls, at least in Nashville, while no one from the Secretary of State's Office has contacted them or notified them in the last year of any non citizens voting who shouldn't have.
"There's no problem with non-citizens voting in a way that they've argued. It's a false flag," Dr. Franklin said.
He said he believes the point of the SAVE tool is not really to crack down on illegal voting, but to create doubt and distrust of the U.S. election system and to spread fear.
"He's (Trump's) using non-citizens as a red herring or as a cover to really shrink the pool of voters, to intimidate voters," Franklin added.
In fact, in other states, voting groups have questioned SAVE's accuracy after, for example in Texas, it mistakenly identified more than 2,000 U.S. citizens as non-citizens.
A federal judge this past summer ordered states to stop using the online system, citing in part its unreliability.
But last month, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, allowing states to resume screening their voting rolls with SAVE.
The Tennessee Secretary of State's office said that they planned to start using it again.
Dr. Franklin wasn't surprised, explaining, "You satisfy the base...and then you satisfy the demands of the president who's putting pressure on these Secretaries of State."
Now again, Tennessee cannot use the SAVE tool to remove anyone from voting in the midterm elections because federal law prohibits any sort of major changes to state voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
Meanwhile, Dr. Franklin said widespread illegal voting by non-citizens is not only extremely rare, but there are a lot more eligible U.S. born voters who are caught committing voter fraud than non-citizens.
