Now ICE is After Our Voting Records
ICE is accessing voters’ personal registration data from county election offices. This is more than another random, brutal headline: it’s all a part of their plan.
Picture your voter registration record: It has your name and address, of course. Your date of birth. Your identification number. A record of every election you’ve ever voted in.
Now imagine a federal immigration agent emails the county election worker who keeps your record, says he’s conducting “ongoing investigations,” and asks for a file on all voters in the county—including you. The election worker looks at the email, wants to be helpful, and sends the information back. Nevermind that ICE has no jurisdiction over elections.
That happened in Webb County, Texas last May. It happened in Forsyth County, North Carolina last November. Axios broke the story last week, and those are just the counties we know about.
A Not-So-Sneak Attack
There was no court order, no federal judge signed off. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative unit inside ICE, just emailed county election offices. The administrators in both counties handed over voters’ personal data voluntarily.
Another HSI criminal analyst emailed the Texas Secretary of State this spring. He said he was conducting “ongoing investigations,” and wanted to know how to obtain voter information and what subpoenas he’d need to get it at scale.
We’re not dealing with the smartest authoritarians in the world here: they’re telling us exactly what they plan to do to block our votes. We’ve been warned.
But Wait, There’s More
The county-level disclosures are just the most recent development; the DOJ’s full election disruption operation is vast. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. to force them to turn over their complete voter rolls. That’s worth emphasizing: the federal government is demanding your private voter data. If your state tries to protect your private data, the Trump Administration will sue your state in federal court to force them to disclose.
We also know that Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Minnesota a letter demanding the state’s private voter data. The administration’s message was unmistakable: keep refusing to turn over your voters, and ICE keeps operating in your state. Experts called this for what it was: extortion.
What They Want with the Data
Getting your data is their first step, and the Brennan Center for Justice has documented exactly what comes next:
Once the administration has voter roll data, it could run it through a federal database called SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program — to supposedly identify noncitizens who are registered to vote. SAVE has a documented problem: it relies on incomplete and outdated records, and it regularly produces incorrect results.
Here’s the thing: the incorrect results aren’t a flaw. They’re the point.
Those false positives will become “evidence,” and the evidence will become a government report claiming to have found thousands of ineligible voters, and that report justifies their next steps: purging your neighbors from the rolls, challenging election results the administration disagrees with, prosecuting organizations that register voters.
Even if none of that is successful, they’ve still planted the seed that there’s a bug in the system and something about our elections that people just shouldn’t trust.
What This Means for Voters
Think about who this impacts—think about how it impacts them.
Not just immigrants, though the chilling effect on lawfully registered citizens in mixed-status families and communities is real. Think about the organizer registering voters in a Texas border county who now has to explain to her neighbors what might happen to their information. Think about the naturalized citizen who’s voted in every election for twenty years and now wonders whether her personal voting record is being run through DHS databases.
Election interference doesn’t always look like a raid on a nonprofit’s offices, but it’s election interference all the same.
The Brennan Center has mapped the full strategy — from voter data grabs, to frivolous government reports, to manufactured prosecutions. Read their report.
Tell someone.
Our silence is the Trump Administration’s ally.
And if you want to understand how this fits into the larger authoritarian plan — and what we can actually do about it — there’s more coming for paid subscribers. Starting this Friday, I’m launching a new series goes deep: the full authoritarian playbook, the ways they’re attacking elections right now, and a framework for how we the People fight back.
Upgrade to paid to get the deep-dive on the authoritarian playbook delivered to your inbox each Friday.