The appeal of a citizenship database is obvious: take a complicated eligibility question, put it into a system and let the system produce an answer. The danger is just as obvious once you have ever dealt with a government database. Names change. Records lag. People are entered differently across agencies. A mismatch can look like certainty to a computer while feeling like disenfranchisement to the person standing at the other end.

That matters for Black immigrants and naturalized citizens who already navigate multiple bureaucracies to establish identity, status and eligibility. A voting system that treats incomplete data as proof of ineligibility can make citizenship feel conditional long after the legal process is complete.

Election integrity is a legitimate goal. The safeguard has to work both ways: preventing unlawful votes while also preventing lawful voters from being removed, delayed or intimidated by bad data. Systems need transparent standards, notice, a meaningful correction process and enough time for an error to be fixed before an election is over.

The question is not whether technology can help administer elections. It is whether we are willing to build systems that presume a database can be wrong before a voter pays the price.