Senators call on DHS to halt initiative ahead of November election
The whistleblower’s account was provided to the senators last week by the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund, which represents the whistleblower. According to the report, the Department of Homeland Security last month began surging personnel for what it called the Unlawful Voter Initiative, with federal agents then scouring voter rolls and plugging personally identifiable information into public-facing state websites to check individuals’ voting histories.
The report describes the methodology in detail. To access individual voter records through those state-run portals, “employees may be required to use the PII to make false attestations that they are the voter or are acting with the voter’s express authorization, in order to access these individual voters’ records,” the report says. “Such false representations would likely violate relevant state law.”
Virginia is one state that requires users to make such an attestation when searching voter rolls. The report does not name other states that may have similar requirements.
According to the whistleblower’s account, the Office of Chief Counsel at DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provided guidance stating that federal agents could use state voter websites for “adjudicative or investigative” purposes. DHS did not respond to NPR’s request for comment on the allegations.
The report also includes training materials about the Unlawful Voter Initiative. The training acknowledges that the voter data set agents were using contains inconsistent information. Each federal officer “was given a quota of at least five subjects to be reviewed per hour and 40 subjects per day … giving officers only twelve minutes to determine if a subject is a U.S. citizen” or could be considered an “unlawful voter,” the report says.
The whistleblower has reason to believe that, with the knowledge and at the direction of leadership at headquarters, the Unlawful Voter Initiative has potentially already committed thousands of violations of state law in an effort to improperly access individuals’ voter records, according to the report.
The DHS initiative and the possibility that agents were breaking state laws were first reported by The New York Times earlier this month.
The whistleblower’s allegations come as the Trump administration has launched an effort across multiple federal agencies to search for and prosecute noncitizens on state voter rolls. That initiative has escalated in recent weeks as November’s Election Day approaches. Previous audits have found instances of noncitizen voting to be very rare.
Padilla and Schumer, in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, called on them to halt the initiative. “If unreliable DHS data is used to generate purported evidence of ‘unlawful voters,’ that could disenfranchise eligible voters or disrupt state and local election administration,” they wrote. “DHS must not allow unreliable federal data or rushed investigations to interfere with Americans’ right to vote or the administration of the November elections.”
DHS has previously acknowledged that the noncitizen numbers it publicly cited on voter rolls were inflated, NPR reported.