Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking to pay a company up to $5 million to collect voter information — including ballot history — for virtually every American as part of the Trump administration’s war on “fraud.” Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative arm, is hiring a firm to collect “publicly available voter registration files and voter history files” for the agency’s “fraud detection and data segmentation activities,” according to solicitation details for the contract, which were published last week. A contractor will be asked to “acquire, document, and securely deliver public voter registration files and, when applicable, public voter history files” from all 50 states, according to the draft. That publicly available information could include names, addresses and whether voters participated in federal elections, though each has its own rules for how that data is collected and stored.
In some cases, that information includes party affiliation, which could suggest how voters cast their ballots in each election. For states that restrict commercial access to voter information, ICE plans to submit authorization letters pressing those states for that data. The contractor for the voter data project won’t be asked to collect and share data about voters’ party affiliation — but that could change if “explicitly directed in writing by the contracting officer,” according to the document.
The request follows the Trump administration’s broader efforts to identify, arrest and deport tens of thousands of people from the country, dovetailing with an expansive effort to restrict access to mail-in ballots, impose nationwide voter ID requirements, and prosecute officials accused of letting ineligible voters cast ballots. Trump is embroiled in a legal battle over his executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to implement a brand-new ballot-tracking process, an overhaul that election officials from across the country have warned amounts to an unconstitutional attack on election administration that will only sow more confusion and introduce potentially catastrophic errors.
USPS workers could end up wrongly tossing out thousands of ballots if any errors are identified, according to a whistleblower complaint. The president is simultaneously demanding Senate passage of his SAVE America Act, which would require ID at the ballot box and proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other restrictions. A federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday on behalf of immigrants’ rights groups accuses Homeland Security and the Department of Justice of interfering with elections by relying on potentially inaccurate federal databases to boost allegations of fraud.
The Trump administration seeks to interfere with the “election rights of citizens, the right of individual states to conduct their own free and fair elections, and to undermine any election results for the upcoming Congressional midterm elections,” according to a lawsuit from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. In July, the president delivered a national address claiming hundreds of thousands of noncitizens were illegally registered to vote in several states, figures that have not been validated and, in at least one state, withdrawn.
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