DHS ramps up hunt for elusive illegal voters

A demonstrator holds an anti-ICE sign while attending the "March on Washington: Defend the Vote" rally at the Lincoln Memorial. — A demonstrator holds an anti-ICE sign while attending the "March on Washington: Defend the Vote" rally at the Lincoln Memorial

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What happened

The Department of Homeland Security has assigned hundreds of agents to an “intensive, weekslong hunt” for noncitizen voters, The New York Times reported Wednesday. Such “election fraud is exceedingly rare,” but DHS is “pulling agents” from “investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism” to scour state voter rolls, sometimes by “effectively posing as individual voters.”

Any suspected noncitizen voters, or people who registered to vote before they became citizens, are referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit. HSI agents were assigned this week to a new “Criminal Voter Fraud surge initiative,” CNN reported. ICE is also “preparing to award” a multimillion-dollar outside contract for a “massive national database of voters,” that will include “voter registration,” as well as voting history and potentially party affiliation, Wired said.

The Trump administration has been aggressively “targeting noncitizen voting to allege it could be a source of significant fraud during the midterm elections,” The Associated Press said. “Given the decades of evidence showing how rare noncitizen voting is, it’s unclear what the administration will discover” in its new efforts or “how verifiable any findings will be,” the Times said. President Donald Trump has already used his repeated “falsehoods about election fraud” to “sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process” and “justify sweeping voting restrictions” he is attempting to enact.