Whistleblower Sounds Alarm on DHS Voter Hunt

What federal employees were reportedly told to do.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece called “ICE Is Coming for the Voter Rolls.” At the time, we knew that Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was launching a coordinated "voter fraud surge initiative" across nine states ahead of the midterms. What bothered me then when I wrote that article was something pretty basic. In national security, you are supposed to start with the threat. What is it? How serious is it? What does the evidence show? And, what government response is actually justified by that evidence? You don’t start with the response and then go hunting for the threat.

That was September 1.

Now we’re getting an extraordinary look inside the broader DHS effort to hunt for alleged unlawful voters, and what a whistleblower says was happening behind the scenes raises even more questions. According to a federal whistleblower whose disclosure was provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, federal personnel working what DHS called the "Unlawful Voter Initiative" were expected to review at least 40 people during each eight-hour workday.

Do the math. That’s about 12 minutes per person. Twelve minutes to examine someone’s citizenship information and voting history and determine whether that person should be identified as a potentially unlawful voter in federal records. Even more concerning is that according to the whistleblower, the underlying data itself may have been unreliable. Remember what we’re talking about here. Not terrorists. Not cartel members. Not suspected human traffickers.

Voters.

This is where the new reporting connects to what I wrote about two weeks ago. This summer, DHS began publicly touting large numbers of potential noncitizens appearing on state voter rolls. Nevada was one of the most revealing examples. DHS initially touted nearly 16,000 potential matches there. That did not mean DHS had found 16,000 people illegally voting. Those records required additional review. DHS subsequently provided Nevada with 185 voter IDs it said it had greater confidence about. That’s why I wrote then that a database match isn’t a conviction. Now we’re learning more about the broader effort behind the government’s search for alleged noncitizen voters.

The whistleblower’s disclosure states that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) personnel were given DHS-provided lists of individuals and instructed to run them through state voter-registration systems. The underlying information reportedly drew from multiple government sources. The whistleblower alleges employees found problems with the data they were being asked to use. Another key issue raised involves naturalized Americans. People who interact with the immigration system can be assigned an alien registration number, commonly called an A-number. The identifier can remain in federal immigration records after someone becomes a naturalized American citizen, which means the existence of an immigration identifier does not, by itself, tell you whether someone is currently a noncitizen. That’s not some tiny technical distinction. It’s the difference between a noncitizen and an American citizen. The whistleblower alleges that unreliable data could wrongly implicate eligible U.S. citizens in federal law-enforcement records as potentially unlawful voters. This is precisely why massive government databases require enormous care.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the disclosure is that USCIS personnel were apparently directed to use personal information to access individual records through state voter-lookup websites. These websites aren’t simply open databases. They’re designed for individual voters to look up their own information. In my home state of Virginia, for example, the state explicitly limits use of its voter lookup system to people attesting that they are searching their own records. California requires personally identifying information, such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number, to access an individual record.

According to the whistleblower, personnel were effectively being instructed to pose as individual voters to access those records. The employees reportedly raised concerns about whether doing so violated state law. Agency leadership told employees to continue conducting the searches after legal concerns were raised, and government attorneys reportedly took the position that the searches were permissible when performed as part of official investigative duties.

I am not declaring that federal employees broke state law. We’ll have to see how the investigation develops. But here’s what I can’t get past: The federal employees being instructed to conduct the searches were reportedly asking whether they should be doing them. That matters.

I’ve spent enough time inside government to know the difference between criticism coming from outside an agency and career personnel raising concerns from within. I know because I’ve been that career person. At other moments in my career, especially during the first Trump administration, I found myself asking some of the same fundamental questions: Is this right? Should we be doing this? And eventually, asking those questions out loud. That experience had nothing to do with this voter initiative, but it taught me to pay attention when the people actually carrying out a government mission begin questioning the information they’re being given, the methods they’re being instructed to use, or whether those methods are lawful.

When career personnel start raising those questions, leadership should listen. So should the rest of us.

The concerns weren’t limited to the data or how voter records were being accessed. According to the whistleblower, USCIS personnel were pulled from their regular duties in late August and given less than two hours of training before being assigned to the initiative. That raises an obvious question: What was DHS taking them away from, and why was this suddenly important enough to take priority?

To be clear, this is not the same HSI operation I wrote about on September 1. That was a separate Homeland Security Investigations voter-fraud surge across nine states. These are distinct efforts but, taken together, they show the extent to which DHS is expanding its involvement in voter records and alleged noncitizen voting as the midterms approach. Add to that the Justice Department’s separate push to obtain detailed voter-registration information from states, and the picture becomes harder to ignore. Different agencies. Different authorities. Different initiatives. Same direction of signal and intent…

Which brings me to the question I care about most now: What happens to the people who were flagged in these voter rolls?

If someone was swept into this initiative because of outdated immigration information, a bad database match, or some other error, was that information corrected? Was it deleted? Or does a federal record now identify an eligible American voter as potentially unlawful? That’s not an abstract concern. According to the whistleblower, employees worried that inaccurate information could become part of government records. Those records can have consequences, including potentially prompting further investigation. A federal record can follow someone for years.

The whistleblower’s allegations need to be investigated. DHS should explain where its data came from, what safeguards were in place, how many people were flagged, how many were ultimately cleared, and what happened to the records of anyone identified incorrectly.

Finding an error isn’t enough. We need to know what the government did with it.

P.S. We are less than two months out from the midterm elections. Take a minute today to double-check your voter registration status. And, vote.

–Olivia