Federal agents may have broken state laws in voter fraud hunt, whistleblower claims

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin testifies before a House committee on June 3. Cliff Owen/AP hide caption

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Cliff Owen/AP

Federal agents may have broken state laws in a wide-ranging hunt for unlawfully registered voters, a federal whistleblower alleges.

The anonymous whistleblower is a client of the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund, which last week provided a report on the whistleblower's account to Democratic U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California. Padilla and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer made the report public Monday.

The report details that last month the Department of Homeland Security began surging personnel for what it called the Unlawful Voter Initiative. Those enlisted federal agents then began scouring voter rolls, plugging personally identifiable information (PII) into public-facing state websites to check for an individual's voter history.

But, the report says, "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."

Virginia, for instance, is one state that includes such an attestation when searching voter rolls.

"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," the report says.

DHS has not responded to NPR's request for comment. According to the whistleblower's account, the Office of Chief Counsel at DHS' U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provided guidance that said federal agents could use state voter websites for "adjudicative or investigative" purposes.

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 report also includes training materials about the Unlawful Voter Initiative. The training acknowledges that the voter data set agents were using contains inconsistent information.

Additionally, the report claims that 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 if they could be considered an "unlawful voter."

The whistleblower's allegations come as the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented 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 draws closer. Yet previous audits have found instances of noncitizen voting to be very rare.

"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," Padilla and Schumer wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, calling on them to halt the initiative. "DHS must not allow unreliable federal data or rushed investigations to interfere with Americans' right to vote or the administration of the November elections."