The Department of Homeland Security is doubling down on the administration’s ongoing investigations into potential voter fraud — reviewing instances involving US citizens and whether or not they registered to vote, or voted, previous to being naturalized, in accordance with an inner memo reviewed by NCS.
The request, stemming from President Donald Trump’s March government order on voting, marks one of many newest initiatives by his administration to amplify allegations of voter fraud and pursue the denaturalization of US citizens.
The memo, distributed to management final week, states that Homeland Security Investigations’ Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit is overseeing the initiative “designed to identify, investigate, and disrupt activities that undermine the integrity of federal, state, and local elections, and to ensure compliance with applicable election laws.”
It additionally requested that HSI places of work “review all open and closed voter fraud cases… and identify any person(s) who registered to vote, and/or voted in any federal, state, or local election, and subsequently became naturalized United States citizens.”
NCS reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for remark.
The initiative was first reported by MSNOW.
In addition to the White House push on voter fraud, the administration has tried to broaden federal energy to strip citizenship as half of a bigger effort linked to Trump’s hardline immigration insurance policies.
The specter of non-citizen voting has been a spotlight of Trump and his allies, together with in Congress, the place Republicans are advancing laws that will require Americans present paperwork proving their citizenship after they register to vote.
Instances of non-citizens voting are uncommon, however election officers and voter advocates acknowledge that non-citizens do generally find yourself on registration rolls, usually inadvertently.
Several states are already using federal immigration data to vet their rolls and people opinions have steadily flagged false positives, NCS has reported. For occasion, in Idaho, after a search of that knowledge tagged 760 potential non-citizens amongst 1 million-plus resident on the rolls, additional overview by election officers narrowed the record to a few dozen instances that have been referred for potential federal felony investigation.
The new memo cites a lot of federal felony statutes concentrating on fraudulent voting and registration for immigration authorities to think about. Those statutes require that the individual to have “knowingly” registered to vote or voted after they have been ineligible.
The new memo comes because the White House had already been coordinating plans final fall between the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security for sharing knowledge as a part of the conservative pursuit of voter fraud.
The goal of that push, in accordance with a supply aware of inner administration discussions that happened late final 12 months, was to determine names on voter rolls who won’t be US citizens.
The Justice Department is at the moment on an unprecedented marketing campaign to acquire private voter data from state voter rolls, which might embody social safety numbers or driver’s license numbers, and has introduced 25 lawsuits towards state election officers. DOJ has sued officers — largely Democrats — that have refused at hand over the confidential registration info. Some Republican state election chiefs are balking on the knowledge request as properly.
In court docket filings and in official correspondence with the states, the Justice Department has claimed it needs the data for enforcement of federal voter registration laws that govern the elimination of deceased voters and voters who have moved, in addition to require that states preserve a centralized, digitized voter registration record. Justice Department officers have additionally verbally informed election officers they intend to overview the voter rolls towards federal voter immigration knowledge, in accordance with West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner.
In the handful of the DOJ voter roll instances the place judges have issued rulings, the judges have all dominated towards the Trump administration — both rejecting the DOJ arguments for acquiring the information on the deserves or throwing out the instances for procedural causes.
NCS’s Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.