The New York Times reported Monday that federal agents may have broken state laws when the Department of Homeland Security ordered them to use private information to access voter records in state databases.
President Donald Trump's effort to find noncitizens on state voter rolls may be relying on questionable data, rushed reviews and even investigative practices that could have violated local state law.
The “Unlawful Voter Initiative” is a Trump administration operation that has reportedly deployed hundreds of federal agents to search voter-registration records for evidence that noncitizens are voting in mass numbers. It was exposed in a New York Times report last month, in which the whistleblower alleged that hundreds of federal agents have been ordered to sift through voter rolls in a widespread hunt to find voter fraud.
“This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (R-N.Y.) said in an interview.
“We’ve never seen anything quite like this. They come up with so many different ways to try and steal the election, to try and jaundice the election, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do," he added.
Democratic senators sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding that the operation be stopped while they seek answers. The whistleblower said that agents are required to complete at least 40 reviews in eight hours, giving them little time to search each voter's citizenship and voting history.
Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor sounded the alarm Monday in a column, saying that the software used to control a national voter database hands any hacker the key to flip a switch and nullify voters' eligibility to cast a ballot and have it counted.
One of the pieces of information revealed by the whistleblower is that the federal agents are looking through personally identifiable information that comes from both internal government information as well as external sources, including things like birth dates and even partial Social Security numbers while they're searching through records.
The whistleblower questioned whether it's legal.
"The agents plugged those names and personal data into public-facing state websites to find a subject’s voter history," the report said. "Some states, such as Virginia, declare explicitly that only individual voters may use the search tool to look up their own records. Others, such as California, require specific information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number in an effort to limit the use of the tool to individuals."
It's one of the reasons that the whistleblower said that they flagged it for those leading the investigation within Homeland Security's Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. They were told that agents could use the database for operations in the voter search initiative. "Yet leadership appeared to acknowledge the potential for legal liability..." the report said.
The leadership told the whistleblower that agents “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented.”
“This statement suggests that there may be legal implications for accessing these websites,” said a report produced by the government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund. They have been working with the whistleblower and providing them with legal representation. “Yet they are still requiring officers to engage in this illegal activity with promises of personal liability protection.”
