Homeland Security officers are illegally accessing state voter data, new whistleblower alleges

Agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been ordered to unlawfully access state voting records to carry out the department’s escalating elections-related probes, an anonymous federal whistleblower disclosed in a new report.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has directed its officers to misrepresent themselves as voters on state election agency websites while checking dozens of people’s registration and voting records, the whistleblower said. 

Legal nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund produced a report based on the whistleblower’s account. It was then included in a letter Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) sent to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin Sunday.

The senators demanded that Mullin and USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow immediately halt the searches and provide an urgent report to Congress on its activities.

USCIS’s directive to its agents will likely result in “thousands of violations of state laws,” Sen. Padilla warned in a release Monday.

USCIS allegedly issued the order as part of the Trump administration’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” a sweeping search for voting fraud — specifically instances of noncitizens registering or casting a ballot — ahead of the November elections.

As dozens of studies and state audits have shown, vanishingly few noncitizens try to register and even fewer attempt to or successfully vote. As part of their campaign to undermine the upcoming midterms, however, President Donald Trump and his cabinet officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, have repeatedly alleged that noncitizen voting is rampant.

As part of that effort, the whistleblower alleged that USCIS told its Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) branch to search dozens of voter files each day using faulty data.

When officers raised concerns that entering sensitive personal data into state election portals to obtain information on individual voters could violate state laws, agency leaders told them to move forward with the searches anyway.

While most states have public-facing voter files, many of them restrict who can view individual voters’ records to protect people’s personal information and privacy.

On Virginia’s election website, for example, a person has to enter a voter’s date of birth and the last four digits of their Social Security number and click a box indicating that they either are the voter or have been authorized by them to access the data.

“I certify and affirm that the information provided to access my voter registration is my own or I am expressly authorized by the voter to access this information. I understand that it is unlawful to access the record of any other voter, punishable as computer fraud under Va. Code § 18.2-152.3,” the box reads.

The whistleblower did not say whether FDNS agents specifically conducted illegal searches through Virginia’s website. However, Virginia’s registration portal was included in an internal website FDNS created to facilitate state voter record searches.

Florida’s registration portal was also linked on FDNS’s website even though it explicitly says it “is intended for use by a registered voter to determine his or her voter registration and voting status.”

Additionally, several states, including California, similarly restrict access to individual voter files by requiring the person to input sensitive personal information. 

The Democracy Defenders Fund said its client wished to remain anonymous because they have “an extreme fear of retaliation.”

The whistleblower also said DHS is using data that USCIS says is incomplete and unreliable to investigate people it believes illegally registered or voted. USCIS leadership has previously said that the data was compiled with something called “supplemental magic.”

Despite the concerns about the data, DHS leaders have ordered officers to use it to create federal law enforcement records, called TECS records, against people, many of whom are likely naturalized citizens.

“The whistleblower’s claim states that officers must create TECS records against a U.S. citizen even when DHS-provided voting data appears unreliable, such as uncertain naturalization dates, multiple entries, or other mismatches,” Padilla’s office said. 

“Naturalized U.S. citizens who are falsely flagged as ‘unlawful voters’ are likely to be referred to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) for potential criminal investigation. Targets of this initiative have no knowledge or ability to correct data errors,” it added.

The whistleblower said that hundreds of FDNS officers have been assigned to review records after receiving only a single 1-hour, 45-minute video training course.

In fact, agents have a 40-person-per-day quota, the whistleblower said, leaving them just a few minutes to resolve complex questions of identity, citizenship, and voting and registration history for each search.

The whistleblower’s allegations offer a glimpse into DHS’s opaque but expansive voter fraud investigation, which it initiated just a handful of weeks before the midterms. The probe broke with the federal government’s long-standing principle against taking overt investigative steps or bringing charges in election-related cases in the period close to an election.

The probe also came after the Department of Justice (DOJ) largely failed to obtain states’ unredacted voter rolls. It sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., in an effort to force them to turn over their rolls. However, federal courts have so far unanimously ruled that voter rolls are not records that the federal government can demand from states.

“The DHS Initiative appears to be an illegal alternative to DOJ’s unlawful efforts,” Democracy Defenders Fund said in the report.

The department launched the probe after claiming without evidence that hundreds of thousands of potential noncitizens were on state voter rolls. 

In July, Mullin publicly alleged that an analysis of Nevada’s public voter file “revealed that there may be as many as 15,903 non-citizens registered” in the state.

However, in subsequent private meetings with state officials, DHS officials walked back Mullin’s allegations. They instead disclosed that the department had identified only 185 “potential” noncitizens registered in the state. The figure cited by the secretary was only a “ceiling” of how many noncitizens could be registered, they said.