DHS surges agents to support voter fraud investigations

As November’s midterms approach, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is launching a wide-ranging voter fraud investigation targeting nine states.

According to internal documents viewed by CNN, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a component of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), began surging agents in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin on Sept. 1.

The documents confirm that HSI launched a “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative to pursue investigative leads, conduct field interviews, and support timely prosecutorial review.” Agents have been tasked with investigating suspected or confirmed instances of voter fraud, especially cases of noncitizens voting or registering to vote.

A DHS spokesman said that the agency is “not able to comment on any active investigations,” but confirmed that HSI “is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.”

The spokesman added, “Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders.”

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In July, the DHS announced that it had identified at least 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states: California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told Zeale News that the scale of noncitizen voter fraud found so far is evidence that a “much wider investigation is warranted.”

“Those non-citizens registered to vote don’t need to vote themselves. The point is, being registered to vote generates a ballot — or multiple ballots — in that person’s name. Organizations are then paid to harvest those ballots and cast them as votes,” she said.

“This criminal fraud is what so many blue states are trying to protect by refusing to turn over voter roll information to the Justice Department,” Ries continued. “But DHS is conducting this investigation because it has the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, which provides an alien’s immigration status to determine whether an alien applicant for a benefit, including voter registration, is eligible.”

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Zeale News that the voter fraud probe “is a critically important project for DHS to do.”

“It would have been better to start a year ago instead of a couple of months before an election, but ideally it will continue over the next couple of years, and even indefinitely,” she said.

According to Vaughan, the DHS is the federal agency best equipped to tackle widespread noncitizen voter fraud due to the SAVE program. Most states, she said, have been “oblivious” to the need to screen noncitizens from voter rolls, especially since the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 was passed.

Nicknamed the “Motor Voter Act,” the NVRA offers a streamlined voter registration for those renewing a driver’s license or applying for public benefits. While noncitizens are expressly barred by federal law from voting in U.S. elections, the NVRA voter registration process does not require any proof of U.S. citizenship but instead has potential registrants simply check a box testifying that they are citizens.

“We know that some non-citizens have voted, but until the Trump administration started using its tools to mine the records on a larger scale, we had no idea just how prevalent it is for noncitizens to be registered to vote, and how many have actually voted,” Vaughan said. “It's shameful that states have not sought to work with DHS before to get to the bottom of this.  Instead, many state leaders — and especially journalists — preferred to pretend that noncitizens would not dare take advantage of the weaknesses in our systems.”

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Ken Cuccinelli, chairman of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Transparency Initiative, called the HSI surge “a very appropriate and helpful use” of federal resources.

“Their jurisdiction covers any lawbreaking by noncitizens, and this clearly falls in that bucket,” he told Zeale News. “This does not mean you will be seeing agents at polling places, a common wild-eyed fear-mongering narrative tactic of the left, but it does mean that a dedicated set of investigative resources will be addressed to this problem.”