U.S. States use 2 nearly identical systems to check applicant identities. One is used to check Driver’s License applicants, the other is used to check Voter Registration applicants. One is flawed, the other flawless. Guess which is used for our elections.
The Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) is a generic term for a state’s DMV, MVD, and so on. MVA’s use a service called SSOLV (Social Security Online Verification) to verify driver license applicants. When a person needs a license or ID card, they go to an MVA office. Staff create an “ID verification request” by entering all 9 digits of the SS#, name, and DOB into their computer. That data travels through the middleman network AAMVAnet, to the Social Security Administration, and comes right back with a response.
To verify the identities of Voter Registration applicants, states use a nearly identical program called HAVV (Help America Vote Verification). These ID verifications are sent by the same MVA department, also through AAMVAnet, to the same SSA servers. But this system seems handicapped. Only the last 4 digits of the SS# can be used. And it gets worse. (Funfact: Texas pays $480 per year for its AAMVAnet service).
Both SSOLV and HAVV are services provided by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA). States sign agreements for programs and services provided by AAMVA. In fact, SSOLV and HAVV are so similar that they are often priced as one service and one line item on purchase orders. Note: If a voter applicant doesn’t have a driver’s license, HAVV must be used to check the identity. Some states use HAVV for more than this, including their entire database.
Voter applications come from many sources – online, paper, and applying for gov benefits. Because of this, HAVV verifications are processed differently from SSOLV. Typically, as voter applications come into a Country Recorders’ office, a list is created of those needing ID verification (a batch). These County lists are combined each day by the Secretary of State. This is then given to their MVA, who submits this “batch” at night to the Social Security Administration (SSA). The results are disseminated back to the original locations.
In 2010, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the SSA released a report about HAVV. Oddly, that 8-person team looked at only one issue and talked with only 10 states. They found that many HAVV requests are resubmissions of the same person, over and over. In some states, 30-70% of all requests were resubmissions. For instance, a 37-year-old Illinois man was verified 342 times on the same day.
In other examples, Ohio submitted the same voter for verification 1,778 times over an 11-day period in 2008. In 2009, they submitted the same person for verification another 13,824 times. That 77-year-old man had been dead for 4 years. The OIG report shows the same person can be processed 10, 30, even 50 times or more each year. Read on to learn why we are mentioning 18-year-old data.
Of the 10 states questioned by the OIG, 6 didn’t know why resubmissions were happening, and didn’t seem to care. Four states indicated that voter verifications were resubmitted automatically when that voter’s info was changed or updated. In 2008, about 32% of all verification transactions processed through HAVV were resubmissions. In 2009, it was about 20%.
After the report, the Social Security Administration stated it wasn’t necessary to create a process that detects or fixes why a person is submitted repeatedly. From what we can tell, not a single improvement has been made to HAVV since that 2010 report. After many unanswered FOIAs, staff at a Secretary of State office in the Midwest said, “We too are curious about HAVV data. It’s run by the DMV and somewhat of a black box to us.” (Read much more: The Gateway Pundit, 2/27/2026) (Archive)