DHS posts a notice seeking a contractor to acquire public voter registration and voter history files
The Department of Homeland Security posted a procurement notice stating it is seeking to award a contract for up to $5 million for analytics and ongoing fraud detection from public voter data.
What happened
The notice followed a draft notice posted on a federal procurement site the previous week, under which DHS had been conducting market research for a contract for "the handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files" to help support Homeland Security Investigations' voter fraud investigations; that procurement period has since closed. The notice states that the contractor "shall acquire, document, and securely deliver public voter registration files and, when applicable, public voter history files from Government-identified U.S. jurisdictions." Reporting on the same draft says the contractor will be asked to collect those files from all 50 states, that for states which restrict commercial access to voter information ICE plans to submit authorization letters pressing those states for the data, and that the contractor will not collect party affiliation data unless "explicitly directed in writing by the contracting officer."
Why it matters
A single national file of who is registered and who voted, assembled for a federal law-enforcement agency, is a different object from the state-by-state rolls it is built out of. The tracker's assessment is that the purchase is the mechanism: a vendor acting as the government's acquisition agent reaches records that states restrict, and the capacity outlasts the investigation it is bought for.