Accessibility links Skip to main content Keyboard shortcuts for audio player Open Navigation Menu Newsletters NPR Shop Get NPR+ Close Navigation Menu Home News Expand/collapse submenu for News National World Politics Business Health Science Climate Race Culture Expand/collapse submenu for Culture Books Movies Television Pop Culture Food Art & Design Performing Arts Life Kit Gaming Music Expand/collapse submenu for Music Tiny Desk New Music Friday All Songs Considered Music Features Podcasts & Shows Expand/collapse submenu for Podcasts & Shows Daily Morning Edition Weekend Edition Saturday Weekend Edition Sunday All Things Considered Up First Here & Now NPR Politics Podcast Featured Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Fresh Air Wild Card with Rachel Martin It's Been a Minute Embedded Get NPR+ More Podcasts & Shows Search Newsletters NPR Shop Get NPR+ Tiny Desk New Music Friday All Songs Considered Music Features About NPR Diversity Support Careers Press Ethics Whistleblower: Feds may have broken laws in voter fraud hunt Federal agents may have broken state laws after the Department of Homeland Security began surging personnel for what it called the Unlawful Voter Initiative, a federal whistleblower alleges. Elections Federal agents may have broken state laws in voter fraud hunt, whistleblower claims Updated September 14, 202611:02 PM ET Originally published September 14, 20266:05 PM ET By
Benjamin Swasey
,
Jude Joffe-Block
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin testifies before a House committee on June 3. Cliff Owen/AP hide caption
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.
Elections DHS acknowledges the noncitizen numbers it touted on voter rolls were inflated "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 Department accessed publicly available data from states' voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems. It's not rocket science; it's an easy step to secure our elections," a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to NPR.
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."
Elections The Supreme Court rejects Trump's mail voting restrictions for this year's midterms 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."
The DHS spokesperson responded in their statement: "Far from being rushed or untrained, these investigative efforts are conducted diligently and professionally. Identification and investigation of aliens who vote in our elections provides an essential guarantee in the authenticity of our election results. There is no quota on criminality. DHS will pursue each and every illegal voter to the fullest extent of the law."
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