DHS Protects Democracy By Investigating Every Voter

The Department of Homeland Security has protected Americans from government overreach by collecting tens of millions of their voter records and examining them in federal databases without imposing the exhausting formality of consent. Internal documents released Oct. 7 by Democracy Forward show that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations acquired 48.4 million voter records, scrutinized more than 150 nonprofit groups and considered undercover operations against organizations registering voters. Officials call the effort “election integrity,” the preferred term because “federal surveillance of civic participation” takes longer to fit on a commemorative mug.

The administration’s broader election hunt has reportedly generated about 1,600 cases and 160 arrests, meaning investigators reviewed enough records to populate several large states and discovered a criminal menace roughly the size of a well-attended suburban wedding. The results confirmed the operation’s extraordinary precision: For every arrest, agents merely had to inspect the personal information of approximately 302,500 voters, an efficiency rate normally achieved only by searching an entire haystack and arresting one piece of straw.

President Donald Trump praised the strategy as proof that elections remain secure only when treated as sprawling crime scenes. “We looked at everybody, millions and millions of people, very suspicious people, including citizens, and by investigating every voter we proved voting is completely safe unless people actually vote,” Trump said. DHS officials emphasized that much of the information was publicly available, the traditional federal doctrine holding that privacy ceases to exist once a bureaucrat can locate someone’s birthday after clicking through six menus and accepting a cookie policy.

Officials also considered placing undercover agents inside voter-registration organizations, allowing Americans signing up to participate in democracy the reassuring experience of being assisted by a federal operative pretending not to know where the absentee-ballot form is. The initiative represents a major advance in election security: Rather than waiting for evidence of widespread fraud, the government can collect everyone’s information first, investigate civic groups second and decide what crime it prevented after lunch. Democracy is safest when every voter is treated as a suspect and nobody risks using it.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.