- Homeland Security Investigations — the ICE unit that normally chases drug cartels and human traffickers — is spending September and October combing through voter records in nine states, including California and Nevada, two states with sizable Latino electorates.
- State officials say the federal government skipped them entirely, and the flagship number behind the crackdown, a claimed 250,000 noncitizens registered across four states, has already fallen apart under scrutiny: in Nevada, a manual review confirmed only 185 of the nearly 16,000 people DHS first flagged.
- A federal judge ruled in June that the database powering these searches violates privacy law, and multiple investigations have found it disproportionately misidentifies naturalized citizens, including many Latino immigrants, as ineligible to vote.
Steve Hobbs learned his state had landed in the federal government's crosshairs the same way most Washingtonians did: by reading about it online. Washington's top election official says nobody at the Department of Homeland Security picked up the phone, sent an email, or gave his office any warning before adding the state to a roster of nine facing a new, intensive hunt for voter fraud.
