A whistleblower has accused the Department of Homeland Security of directing its own agents to misrepresent themselves—and, in the process, potentially violate state law—while sifting through state rolls for voters to investigate. This stems from DHS’s Unlawful Voter Initiative, a politically motivated pre-midterm dragnet billed as an election integrity measure. The whistleblower submitted their account to Sen. Alex Padilla of California; yesterday, Padilla and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer made the report public. NPR explains:
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.
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 initiative’s own materials describe a process built to prioritize speed over accuracy. Agents are held to a quota of at least five subjects per hour and 40 per day, leaving roughly 12 minutes to determine someone’s citizenship status—all the while relying on a dataset the training materials themselves acknowledge is unreliable. That’s, again, on top of the whole directing-our-own-agents-to-commit-crimes element. In light of these serious design failures, Schumer and Padilla called on the Trump administration to halt the initiative. They pointed out it could disenfranchise eligible voters rather than catch fraudulent ones. Maybe that’s the point all along?
It’s hard not to read this as suppression camouflaged as election integrity, just the latest in a pattern for this administration that includes the mail-in ballot portal story we’ve been tracking for weeks.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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