Federal agents may have broken state laws in voter fraud hunt, whistleblower claims

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin testifies before a House committee on June 3. Cliff Owen/AP hide caption

Federal agents may have broken state laws in a wide-ranging hunt for unlawfully registered voters, a federal whistleblower alleges.

The anonymous whistleblower is a client of the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund, which last week provided a report on the whistleblower's account to Democratic U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California. Padilla and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer made the report public Monday .

The report details that last month the Department of Homeland Security began surging personnel for what it called the Unlawful Voter Initiative. Those enlisted federal agents then began scouring voter rolls, plugging personally identifiable information (PII) into public-facing state websites to check for an individual's voter history.

But, the report says, "employees may be required to use the PII to make false attestations that they are the voter or are acting with the voter's express authorization, in order to access these individual voters' records. Such false representations would likely violate relevant state law."

Virginia , for instance, is one state that includes such an attestation when searching voter rolls.

"The Whistleblower has reason to believe that, with the knowledge and at the direction of leadership at headquarters, the Unlawful Voter Initiative has potentially already committed thousands of violations of state law in an effort to improperly access individuals' voter records," the report says.

DHS has not responded to NPR's request for comment. According to the whistleblower's account, the Office of Chief Counsel at DHS' U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provided guidance that said federal agents could use state voter websites for "adjudicative or investigative" purposes.