AAGC Statement on DHS Agents’ Possible Broken Laws in Baseless Voter Fraud Search

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, September 14, 2026

Washington, D.C. – A bombshell report from a whistle-blower revealed that federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security may have broken state laws in their baseless search for voter fraud, including posing as individual voters to look up voter records, and using data riddled with errors that agents feared could result in a falsification of records.

Following The New York Times reporting on this report, Cole Leiter, Executive Director of Americans Against Government Censorship shared the following statement: 

“President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is diverting crucial resources away from efforts to stop drug traffickers to instead pursue his voter fraud fantasy for which there is no evidence. Now federal agents may have broken the law to do it – knowingly sweeping up American citizens in the process. Trump’s efforts to weaponize government agencies like DHS as a tool for his corrupt political agenda is making us all less safe.” 

NYT: Whistle-Blower: Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Search for Voter Fraud

Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders by posing as voters as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday.

The authorities also required agents to meet quotas, which afforded them a mere 12 minutes to review each voter record. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, the whistle-blower said in a nearly 30-page report.

The whistle-blower report, provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, offers an inside view of the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” The New York Times revealed last month the existence of the operation, which has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour voter rolls managed by the states in a widespread hunt for evidence of voter fraud. The investigation stems from President Trump’s longstanding fixation on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing the practice is vanishingly rare.

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The whistle-blower also questioned the legality of a crucial part of the operation, with investigators effectively posing as individual voters by using personally identifiable information compiled from both internal and external sources, such as birth dates or partial Social Security numbers, to look up voter records.

The agents plugged those names and personal data into public-facing state websites to find a subject’s voter history. Some states, such as Virginia, declare explicitly that only individual voters may use the search tool to look up their own records. Others, such as California, require specific information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number in an effort to limit the use of the tool to individuals.

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The office of the chief counsel at D.H.S. said it was permissible for agents to use the state databases for operations such as the Unlawful Voter Initiative. Yet leadership appeared to acknowledge the potential for legal liability, responding to internal questions that agents “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented.”

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Core to the operation is a compilation of data on hundreds of thousands of voters from across the country, described to agents as “source data,” according to previous reporting by The Times. 

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The whistle-blower report, however, indicates that the data is likely filled with errors. According to a transcript of a training video included in the account, the investigation has relied on data from multiple sources, including public voter files obtained from states, Department of Justice data and queries of records compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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The whistle-blower report suggested that agents were worried that creating records that relied on potentially faulty data could amount to falsification of records, which would be a federal crime.

Additionally, agents were instructed to look for evidence that naturalized citizens had registered to vote or cast ballots before they were granted citizenship. Agents who came to believe the source data was faulty grew reluctant to flag individuals based on that data, the whistle-blower said.

“In other words,” the report says, “the current process is knowingly sweeping known U.S. citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters.’