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DHS mixed voter files with data-broker records, flagged citizens as "unlawful voters," lawsuit says.

League of Women Voters, EPIC, and LULAC want a judge to block the policy and order the data deleted before election day.

DHS mixed voter files with data-broker records, flagged citizens as "unlawful voters," lawsuit says.
Stock photo. Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

The Department of Homeland Security has quietly pulled in voter records from at least 47 states and is mixing them with commercial data broker files to hunt for "unlawful voters," according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, Oct. 15. The groups suing want a judge to stop it and make DHS delete what it has collected.

The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) filed the 42-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case is League of Women Voters v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:26-cv-03602. It names DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as defendants. Election Day is Nov. 3.

What the lawsuit says DHS is doing

The complaint says DHS got some version of the voter lists of at least 47 states, even though many states refused the Justice Department's demands for them. The Justice Department sued 30 states and D.C. over those refusals, the complaint says, and at least 16 states handed over complete, unredacted lists.

Those files can include Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, birth dates, home addresses, voting histories, and party affiliations, according to EPIC. The complaint says an internal HSI report counted 50.6 million records taken in from the Justice Department and 48.4 million more from other sources as of June. DHS also combined voter lists with commercial data from Accurint, a LexisNexis product, and sought to feed voter data into an ICE enforcement system, the groups allege.

"DHS has no authority to stockpile voter data for a nationwide election-law dragnet," the complaint says.

Citizens flagged as "unlawful voters"

The plaintiffs say the system flags real citizens. The complaint points to Nevada: DHS claimed 15,903 noncitizens were registered there, then said it had identified 185. Nevada officials found all 185 were U.S. citizens, the complaint says. It quotes a whistleblower letter saying the effort "is knowingly sweeping known US citizens in as potentially 'unlawful voters.'"

The complaint says flagged people can also land in TECS, a DHS border-screening database, which can mean extra border screening and losing Global Entry.

Nevada isn't the only place DHS's numbers shrank. In July, DHS said about 250,000 noncitizens were registered in four states, including more than 14,500 in Pennsylvania. At an Aug. 13 meeting, DHS staff told Pennsylvania officials they did not have "high confidence" in that figure, according to a letter from Al Schmidt, the state's Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth, reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Democracy Docket. A DHS spokesperson told the Inquirer the agency corrected "their misunderstanding" at that meeting. Schmidt said DHS still hadn't sent the methodology it promised.

CREW, which also represents the plaintiffs in this case, sued DHS in late September for the records behind those numbers, including its data sources, matching criteria, and error rates. CREW says DHS has refused to disclose its methodology even though election officials in at least three of the four states have demanded it, Democracy Docket reported.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Associated Press.

The case turns on the Privacy Act, the 1974 law that limits how federal agencies collect, combine, and share records about people. In plain terms: an agency that builds a new database about Americans must announce it publicly and explain how it will be used. The groups say DHS didn't. They bring five claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, which lets courts strike down agency actions that are unlawful or "arbitrary and capricious," including that DHS skipped required Privacy Act notices and Paperwork Reduction Act review.

The groups ask the court to declare the policy illegal, block it, order DHS to delete the data, and bar DHS from using it or sharing it back with the Justice Department.

"Linking voter rolls to immigration enforcement is voter intimidation, and LULAC will not stand for it," said Juan Proaño, LULAC's CEO. Democracy Forward and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) represent the plaintiffs.

This is the second court fight over the same data in two weeks. On Oct. 9, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled against the Justice Department's effort to collect unredacted voter rolls and share them with DHS (Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 26-1352, D.D.C.). "Behind all the window dressing, the challenged policy represents the federal government's attempt to decide who gets to vote," she wrote. The Justice Department said it plans to appeal.

The DOJ has a stunning losing streak in these cases, indicating that courts are highly skeptical of its authority to collect state voter records. That losing streak has surpassed over 20 cases.

What it means for you

Working people who move often, change jobs, rent, or recently became citizens are the voters most likely to be mismatched in a data dragnet. A false flag can mean challenges at the polls or a name questioned on the rolls. We condemn using voter rolls as an immigration tool weeks before an election.

Check your registration now at vote.gov or your state election office's website. If you are told you're not on the rolls, ask for a provisional ballot.

Sources

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