ICE moves to buy a national voter database
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement published an acquisition forecast document for a contract worth between $2 million and $5 million to acquire, handle and analyze voter registration and voter history data for its Homeland Security Investigations unit.
What happened
The Department of Homeland Security component plans to spend up to $5 million on services supporting its "fraud detection" and "data segmentation" efforts. The voter history files sought include data from general, primary, runoff and special federal elections. The contracting officer is listed as Michael Royer, a section chief at Homeland Security Investigations. The firm fixed price contract is expected to be awarded in the coming weeks following an estimated solicitation release the following week. WIRED characterizes the result as amounting to a federal voter database.
The forecast follows a request for information ICE posted the previous week, beginning market research into "handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files" to support HSI "fraud detection and data segmentation activities"; that comment period lasted just three days, closing 28 August. FedScoop reports that while ICE intends to restrict the collection of party affiliation data to some degree, per the draft document, the DHS unit can still request that the contractor retain and share that data.
Why it matters
Voter registration records are public at the state level, so the change here is not secrecy but consolidation: a federal immigration enforcement agency assembling registration and voting-history files across jurisdictions builds an investigative capability that did not previously exist in one place. Once a federal agency holds a national voter file inside an enforcement apparatus, the question of who may query it, and against what other databases, is settled by contract and internal policy rather than by the state laws that govern the underlying records.