Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders by posing as voters as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday.
The authorities also required agents to meet quotas, which afforded them a mere 12 minutes to review each voter record. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, the whistle-blower said in a nearly 30-page report.
The whistle-blower report, provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, offers an inside view of the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” The New York Times revealed last month the existence of the operation, which has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour voter rolls managed by the states in a widespread hunt for evidence of voter fraud. The investigation stems from President Trump’s longstanding fixation on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing the practice is vanishingly rare.
Democrats and voting rights activists have denounced the operation as yet another way Mr. Trump, who has acknowledged the headwinds Republicans are facing as they try to retain control of Congress, is trying to sow doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections. They fear that eligible voters could be disqualified from participating in the fall midterms, or, worse, that Mr. Trump will use the investigation to try to discard actual results.
“This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” Mr. Schumer, the minority leader, said in an interview. He added: “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.”
On Sunday, the senators sent a letter to Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, demanding that the operation be halted and also seeking answers to a dozen specific questions. The senators included the full whistle-blower account, which was produced by Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit watchdog group founded in 2023.
The identity of the whistle-blower is not known to The Times. Democracy Defenders Fund said in its report that the whistle-blower requested anonymity because of “an extreme fear of retaliation but they feel an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed.”
According to the whistle-blower, agents are expected to complete at least 40 reviews in each eight-hour day, giving them scant time to determine each voter’s citizenship and voting history. The consequence of the investigation is potentially vast, according to the account, because each review is recorded in a database that could affect individuals’ immigration status or legal permanent residency.
The whistle-blower also questioned the legality of a crucial part of the operation, with investigators effectively posing as individual voters by using personally identifiable information compiled from both internal and external sources, such as birth dates or partial Social Security numbers, to look up voter records.
The agents plugged those names and personal data into public-facing state websites to find a subject’s voter history. 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.
Worried about the potential legal ramifications of such actions, the whistle-blower “expressed concerns” to those leading the investigation within Homeland Security’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, according to the account.
The office of the chief counsel at D.H.S. said it was permissible for agents to use the state databases for operations such as the Unlawful Voter Initiative. Yet leadership appeared to acknowledge the potential for legal liability, responding to internal questions 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 the Democracy Defenders Fund, a government watchdog group that produced the whistle-blower report. “Yet they are still requiring officers to engage in this illegal activity with promises of personal liability protection.”
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Core to the operation is a compilation of data on hundreds of thousands of voters from across the country, described to agents as “source data,” according to previous reporting by The Times. Agents were given little to no information about where the source data originated; at one point, D.H.S. officials said some immigration information had been added to their source data using “supplemental magic,” according to the whistle-blower account. The mysterious origins of the “source data” comes as voting rights groups and election officials have condemned the Trump administration’s many efforts to compile a national voter file and citizenship list.
The whistle-blower report, however, indicates that the data is likely filled with errors. According to a transcript of a training video included in the account, the investigation has relied on data from multiple sources, including public voter files obtained from states, Department of Justice data and queries of records compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The data also includes what are known as alien identification numbers, the training video says, which are numbers assigned to a noncitizen that stay in their Homeland Security files permanently, even if they subsequently become citizens who are eligible to vote. If the investigation is using the existence of an alien number to flag that a voter is ineligible, many legal citizens are likely to be improperly ensnared as unlawful voters.
The whistle-blower report suggested that agents were worried that creating records that relied on potentially faulty data could amount to falsification of records, which would be a federal crime.
Additionally, agents were instructed to look for evidence that naturalized citizens had registered to vote or cast ballots before they were granted citizenship. Agents who came to believe the source data was faulty grew reluctant to flag individuals based on that data, the whistle-blower said.
“In other words,” the report says, “the current process is knowingly sweeping known U.S. citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters.’”
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