Overview
- Federal guidance shows Homeland Security Investigations began a coordinated criminal voter-fraud surge on Tuesday that will run through mid-October and concentrate work in Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut.
- DHS says U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE system produced more than 24,000 potential noncitizen matches that were referred to HSI, and agents have been reassigned in large numbers to pursue those leads.
- Reporting and internal training materials reviewed by journalists show agents are using state voter-lookup websites and personally identifiable data such as birth dates and partial Social Security numbers and in some cases entering records as if they were individual voters, which legal and privacy experts say risks misidentification and unlawful access to protected information.
- Several state election officials say they first learned of the probes from news reports and have resisted sharing sensitive voter files, while DHS has issued subpoenas in at least one state and Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE would only appear at polling places to address a specific threat or serve a warrant.
- Election experts note that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, prosecutions so far are limited, and observers warn the surge could divert agents from traditional priorities, chill turnout in immigrant communities, and prompt legal challenges over the use of SAVE and state voter data.