The Department of Homeland Security may have broken the law as part of a rushed effort to identify supposed non-citizens on state voter rolls ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, according to a released Monday.
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Investigators are said to have accessed voter records by impersonating individual voters with the use of personal information combed from internal and external sources, the whistleblower claims. This could run afoul of state laws that only allow the registered voter to access their own data.
The report, first revealed by The New York Times, also describes a rushed process where agents are required to review single records in 12 minutes using faulty data that will surely incorrectly flag U.S. citizens as non-citizens. Investigators were told they would not be “personally liable” if they violated a state law, according to the whistleblower.
“You cannot break the law when you say you’re trying to enforce the law, but they’re doing it anyway,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said at a press conference on Monday announcing the findings of the whistleblower report.
The report was provided to Padilla and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) by the legal nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund. It came from an anonymous source within DHS.
Under the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” investigators are tasked to review 40 voters per day at a pace of five cases per hour. They do this by combing through voter rolls and combining them with other data sets, according to the whistleblower report, to identify supposed non-citizens. Previous efforts by state officials to combine such data to identify non-citizens has, in many, if not all, cases, led to U.S. citizens being flagged as non-citizens.
“Our client reports that leadership of the Unlawful Voter Initiative are requiring DHS employees to utilize Personally Identifiable Information (PII), accessed through DHS internal data, to access state voter registration websites,” a letter from Democracy Defenders Fund to Padilla states. “The 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. Such false representations would likely violate relevant state law.”
The result could be thousands of U.S. citizens flagged in a DHS database as non-citizens, causing them to be stopped at ports of entry and potentially flagged for criminal investigation. With just 50 days to go before the midterms, this could disenfranchise thousands or tens of thousands of voters. Padilla believes that’s DHS’ goal.
“It’s about the potential of using manufactured evidence to intimidate voters and disenfranchise Americans or even undermine or challenge this election’s results,” Padilla said.
Padilla and Schumer sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Monday calling on the agency to immediately halt this initiative.
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The agency brushed aside the whistleblower complaint as a media concoction in a statement attributed to a DHS spokesperson.
“One has to question why the media is so dead set on running a smoke screen for illegal alien voters in American elections.”
This initiative began on Aug. 21 when investigators were asked to watch a 1-hour-and-45-minute-long training video, according to the whistleblower. Four days later, investigators began combing through tens or hundreds of thousands of records and running names through state voter registration databases with the goal of completing the task by Sept. 12. In some states, it is illegal for anyone other than the voter to access this data.
In Virginia, the voter registration database search informs users that state law “it is unlawful to access the record of any other voter, punishable as computer fraud under Va. Code § 18.2-152.3.”
“[O]fficers expressed concerns that accessing registered voter information on these websites may be illegal as officers are essentially misrepresenting themselves as the potential registered voter,” the whistleblower report states.
But the agency counsel’s office told them “it is permissible for Immigration Services Officers and Immigration Officers to use these state voter websites for purposes of confirming voter registration status as it pertains to an alien’s eligibility for an immigration benefit.”
The effort to identify non-citizens on state voter rolls comes after the Trump administration sued dozens of states to obtain their full voter rolls, including private sensitive information, to create a first-of-its-kind federal voter roll and run it through DHS’s SAVE citizenship database. That database is known for producing false positives and labeling U.S. citizens as non-citizens. The administration has lost every single case it brought against states to obtain their voter rolls.
The effort to hunt down non-citizen voters is part of a larger effort by President Donald Trump and his allies to undermine the upcoming midterm elections. He directed Republican-run states to engage in an unprecedented spree of redistricting to eliminate Democratic-leaning seats. He issued multiple executive orders aimed at seizing control of election rules ― all of which have been blocked by the courts. And he ordered the Postal Service to refuse delivery of certain mail ballots, which was also blocked by courts and awaits an imminent final ruling from the Supreme Court.
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