Whistleblower: DHS Voter Hunt Puts Federal Staff in Legal Jeopardy

A federal whistleblower has alleged that a Department of Homeland Security push to identify noncitizen voters before November's elections is directing federal employees to misrepresent themselves on state voter lookup tools, in a manner that likely breaches state laws.

The nearly 30-page anonymous disclosure, released Monday by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Alex Padilla, the ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing federal elections, also warns that the effort known as the "Unlawful Voter Initiative" asks staff to create federal law enforcement records from unreliable data. That, the account says, could wrongly implicate U.S. citizens in official documentation and invite further investigation.

The document includes screenshots and transcripts of a DHS training session for a group of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffers. According to the disclosure, those employees were pulled from other duties in late August, given less than two hours of training and then set to running DHS-provided lists of individuals through state voter registration systems in search of "unlawful voters."

The whistleblower contends that officers are expected to review 40 individuals a day, leaving roughly 12 minutes to decide whether each person is a legal voter and to create federal records for anyone found not to be.

Schumer and Padilla said the initiative amounted to an attempt by President Donald Trump to interfere in elections, and that the compressed timelines would prevent officials from conducting proper checks. They noted that DHS data on voters can be unreliable and may diverge from state records, making any federal findings based on it potentially problematic.

"We just got more proof of Trump's vile schemes to rig our elections," Schumer told reporters at a news conference. "The lengths Trump will go to cheat, lie and steal in this upcoming election are simply beyond the pale."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The administration has been targeting noncitizen voting to allege it could be a significant source of fraud in the midterms, even as research shows voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. Trump has pressed for the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters verified as U.S. citizens, and his Justice Department has sued to force the release of detailed voter data in 30 states and the District of Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those cases.

The disclosure describes an effort to work around the lack of data from states by directing Citizenship and Immigration Services employees to pose as individual voters to access their state voter records. Some states, such as Virginia, explicitly limit their lookup tools to people who attest under penalty of law that they are searching for their own records. In others, such as California, personally identifiable information such as a driver's license number or partial Social Security number is required to look up individual voter records.

When officers raised concerns about liability for searching the tools against state guidance, agency leaders told them to proceed anyway, according to the whistleblower.

Schumer and Padilla sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Sunday seeking more information about the initiative and demanding that it be stopped.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, when an immigrant rights group sued to block the agency from using federal databases it alleged were being used to target naturalized citizens, a DHS spokesperson said the department is "laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens."

"The department accessed publicly available data from states' voter rolls and cross referenced them with known illegal aliens in our systems," the spokesperson said at the time. "It's not rocket science; it's an easy step to secure our elections."

The DHS initiative was first reported in early September. The whistleblower account released Monday was produced by the watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund, which said it represents the person as a client. The group said the individual is anonymous because of "an extreme fear of retaliation but they feel an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed."