By Kristina Cooke and Peter Eisler
Sept 24 (Reuters) - The White House has pushed federal agencies to accelerate their review of at least 47 state voter rolls obtained by the Department of Homeland Security, according to an internal email seen by Reuters, part of an unprecedented effort to find noncitizens among registered voters as midterm elections near.
DHS has surged hundreds of officers from across the US security and immigration apparatuses in recent months to comb the rolls for evidence of voter
fraud under its Unlawful Voter Initiative, current and former officials said.
The September 1 email sent by a DHS official briefs colleagues on the review of voter rolls. It shows how the effort is being directed by the White House — and that agency officials are struggling to meet the goals set out for them. At one point, it notes that a DHS official "has offered to raise with the WH COS if we can't get forward progress," a reference to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
The email also reveals that the agency is using a commercial data broker to find sensitive voter information not included in publicly available rolls, which officials and experts warn could lead to citizens being falsely flagged as illegal voters and potentially detained.
The review is the latest attempt by President Donald Trump to vindicate his longstanding assertion that noncitizen voting is widespread in US elections – a claim that has collapsed repeatedly for lack of evidence.
His administration has also urged Republicans to “nationalize” voting in at least 15 places and sought to restrict mail-in balloting, even though the US Constitution gives states, not the federal government, primary authority over election administration.
Critics say the hunt for noncitizen voters is part of a broader strategy to undermine confidence in elections and warn it could disenfranchise legal voters. Multiple studies and audits - including a Reuters analysis in July - have found that the number of unauthorized votes cast in US elections is statistically insignificant.
Reuters found this week that states may have added more than 30,000 noncitizens to their voter rolls since 2000 due to software glitches and clerical errors, but it was unclear how many had cast a ballot, and experts said the numbers were too small relative to the country’s 170 million registered voters to affect elections.
A Reuters review in July found that only 129 people had been charged under the “Voting by Aliens” statute since its 1996 enactment. The Trump administration has charged at least 20 more under the statute in the months since.
The White House said in a statement that all cases of potential noncitizen voting would be pursued. DHS said its investigative efforts are "conducted diligently and professionally in accordance with the law," providing "an essential guarantee in the authenticity of our election results."
FALSE POSITIVES
It is unclear how DHS obtained the voter rolls from the 47 states referenced in the September email.
Since returning to office last year, Trump’s administration has demanded unredacted voter rolls from nearly every state. While at least 16 states have agreed to hand over complete rolls with no redactions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, most have refused to comply.
As a consequence, DHS appears to have relied on public versions of voter rolls with certain personal data removed, such as drivers’ license and Social Security numbers. To fill the gaps, the email shows, DHS has “enriched” the redacted rolls with information bought from Accurint, a private service that collects and sells personal data.
LexisNexis, which owns Accurint, declined to comment.
Federal investigators are matching the augmented voter roll data with records from other government databases -- including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the US State Department and the Social Security Administration -- to identify potential noncitizens, the email showed.
“We have 1,620 cases moving right now that are under investigation,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News on Saturday, “and that list grows every single day.”
But some names in the voter rolls obtained by DHS lacked key details, such as year of birth, making it difficult to match them across various databases, according to the email.
And a US official said the leads sent to agents in recent weeks often included false positives, including citizens who had similar names as immigrants. Another person familiar with the effort said it also mistakenly swept in US citizens born abroad.
DHS had only “some degree of confidence” that the individuals flagged by the review were noncitizens who had "registered to vote and/or voted,” the email said.
Even being flagged "has very real life consequences," including additional scrutiny during air travel and possible complications for those seeking naturalization, said Kerry Doyle, a former DHS deputy general counsel.
"When there is a flag in the system, it's very difficult to fix it. It totally upends your life," Doyle said.
WHITE HOUSE ROLE
At USCIS, which typically processes legal immigration applications, hundreds of fraud detection and national security officers were reassigned to the effort for at least three weeks starting in August, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Officers were given a goal of vetting five names per hour, one of the people said, noting the target was rarely met.
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE that usually investigates cross-border crimes such as human trafficking, were also instructed to surge resources to determine whether potential noncitizens could be charged with voting illegally, the US official said.
After a late August call with the White House, the email said, DHS officials held a meeting in which "the ICE team appeared both unaware of what their leadership had committed to and also indicated they weren't sure they could actually execute, particularly at the volume being sought.”
Some states have said the administration has been unable to back up its assertions of rampant voter fraud.
In Nevada, for example, DHS said in July it had identified nearly 16,000 potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Pressed by the state for evidence, DHS said the figure was preliminary and it had verified just 185 of those cases, according to the office of Nevada’s secretary of state.
The office said DHS declined to provide additional information requested by the state to verify the initial claims.
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Peter Eisler in Washington. Additional reporting by Tom Hals. Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Deepa Babington)
