Why this is unneeded
Citizenship is already required to vote in state and federal elections. Every state currently maintains its own voter rolls. These voter rolls are administered at the state level and how citizenship is proved occurs according to state laws.
Why this is bad
This database represents a breach of state autonomy to administer their elections.
Some localities do not require citizenship to vote. This database could disenfranchise voters in those localities.
This represents a huge target for hackers, and given that every municipality will have access to it, there are a lot of potential ways in which it could be compromised or manipulated.
The federal government is rife with inaccurate information, and is often understaffed to address the issue. These issues can and will disenfranchise voters. States and municipalities are better equipped to handle their voter rolls.
How this will be abused
This database will be used to both verify citizenship, and for election officials to upload who is registered to vote in a given electoral area. This will lead to its usage to disqualify people who are registered in multiple areas. If - 31 days before an election, someone uploads a list of conservative or liberal voters from a purple area such as Florida or Ohio to the rolls of another state using hacked credentials, then it’s very possible those people will be disqualified from voting and may not know until they try to cast their ballot - shifting the balance of the election.
With the Supreme Court recently discarding birthright citizenship without clarifying who qualifies for citizenship, a sufficiently malicious actor could ensnarl the electoral and legal system with arbitrary claims that people’s parents were not U.S. citizens.
Invariably, the data from this will be used to stalk hapless people — either by electoral workers, or by anyone, once it has been hacked.
And, speculatively - what happens if the scope of this morphs to a ‘voter eligibility’ database, where it tries to ascertain if someone is eligible to vote on additional criterion, such as criminal history? Will it be plagued with errors, such as not registering expunged records, or applying one state’s laws to another?
I think it’s because left alone implies intention, and an explanation is only offered at the end of the headline. Whereas other phrasing can avoid that. Baby found alone after mother dies, for instance. Or even Baby found alone by police after mother dies.
Honestly, if I’m going to overthink it, I think it’s because of the cultural tropes of the U.S. and advertiser-driven media. Saying that the police rescue the baby sort of sets up the sentence for misinterpretation, but police rescuing the baby instead of merely finding it is more emotive - it drives engagement, it reinforces the notion that police are protectors.
And following, left alone vs found alone. Police rescue baby found alone […] is sort of narratively poor. There’s a disjoint that I’m sure someone smarter than me can describe, but Police rescue baby left alone […] is a better ‘fit’, even if it’s factually looser. It may have to do with cultural preconditioning where people expect police intervention only when the parent has taken an action.
Heck, Baby left alone after mother dies is saved by police, establishes the narrative without burying the lede, and it even keeps the left alone phrase intact while establishing context before moving to other narrative.
But anyway, my point, I guess, is that the title is editorialized for the wrong kind of drama, and that’s dumb. The situation has its own drama if they would appeal to empathy, rather than people’s desire to bootlick and see evil everywhere.