The Department of Homeland Security may have broken the law as part of a rushed effort to identify supposed non-citizens on state voter rolls ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, according to a whistleblower report released Monday.
Investigators are said to have accessed voter records by impersonating individual voters with the use of personal information combed from internal and external sources, the whistleblower claims. This could run afoul of state laws that only allow the registered voter to access their own data.
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The report, first revealed by The New York Times, also describes a rushed process where agents are required to review single records in 12 minutes using faulty data that will surely incorrectly flag U.S. citizens as non-citizens. Investigators were told they would not be "personally liable" if they violated a state law, according to the whistleblower.
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"You cannot break the law when you say you're trying to enforce the law, but they're doing it anyway," Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said at a press conference on Monday announcing the findings of the whistleblower report.
The report was provided to Padilla and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) by the legal nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund. It came from an anonymous source within DHS.
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