Voting rights and privacy groups are suing the Department of Homeland Security to stop what they say is an “unlawful and secretive effort to compile voter records” in its hunt to uncover noncitizen voters.
The lawsuit filed Thursday by groups including the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center contends that DHS has records from at least 47 states and “many of the nation’s 174 million registered voters,” citing internal government records.
The groups want the collection effort stopped, the information deleted and DHS prevented from using the data. They highlighted that the Privacy Act limits the government’s ability to gather information and that transparency requirements mean DHS should have published a notice in the Federal Register to obtain a new system of records.
“DHS has implemented the Voter Data Collection Policy in secret. Only disclosures made in other litigation have provided any meaningful visibility into how DHS is acquiring millions of Americans’ voter records or what it is doing with them,” the lawsuit states.
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The groups cited a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed an internal Homeland Security Investigations report from June, which said the agency “ingested” more than 50 million voting records, prioritizing states like California, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. The same report also said DHS’s Deputy Assistant Secretary Heather Honey obtained over 48 million records.
A news release from Democracy Forward, one of the legal groups pressing the lawsuit, said DHS has obtained and processed voter records containing highly sensitive personal information, potentially including Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, voting histories and political affiliations.
The agency has also combined voter records with information purchased from commercial data brokers, creating an even more extensive collection of Americans’ personal information, the groups say.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment about whether the agency holds this voter information.
“The federal government has no business secretly collecting the sensitive personal information of millions of American voters and feeding it into immigration enforcement systems under the guise of election security,” Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said in a statement.
A lawsuit filed by the administration provides a glimpse into how DHS may have been operating. The DOJ sued the state of California on Thursday for refusing to halt the ballots of 20,000 voters the administration identified as possible noncitizen voters.
“USCIS regularly conducts investigative processes whereby lists of registered voters or information about voters on voter rolls are analyzed to determine whether anyone registered to vote in a federal election is a noncitizen,” the DOJ lawsuit states. “California’s voter roster containing voter registration information is made available for purchase.”
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