Sinister ICE Scheme for Trump’s Crackpot Obsession Revealed

ICE is plotting to award a multi-million-dollar contract to create a giant national voter database as part of President Donald Trump’s scheme to federalize elections and sow distrust in the midterms, a new report reveals.

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The Trump administration has spent more than a year trying to obtain states’ complete, unredacted voter rolls—which contain sensitive voter data—despite widespread opposition from the states and the courts.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are preparing a contract to handle and securely deliver publicly available “voter registration files and voter history files” to help detect fraud, according to a document published last week.

Either data set could potentially include party affiliation, which experts say would likely violate U.S. voters’ privacy rights, according to Wired, which first reported on the contract document.

The document says the contractor “shall not collect, process, or deliver party affiliation data… unless explicitly directed in writing by the contracting officer,” suggesting an initial prohibition on collecting political party data could change.

The successful contractor will initially be given a list of states to mine. However, it must be able to eventually obtain data for “each federal election specified by the Government, including general, primary, runoff, and special federal elections” in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. That means navigating a patchwork of data-collection procedures, because each state has its own rules for how public voter data is obtained.

The contract is expected to be worth $2 million to $5 million, according to an acquisition planning forecast.

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DHS did not respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.

The move comes six months after Trump signed an executive order giving DHS and the U.S. Postal Service extraordinary roles in election administration, despite the Constitution giving states the authority to administer elections.

The executive order instructs DHS to create state-specific lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote and directs USPS to deliver mail-in ballots only to people whose names appear on the lists.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the order, and it has been challenged in court.

In the meantime, DHS has assigned agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the branch of ICE that usually investigates human trafficking and drug smuggling, to gather evidence of Trump’s voter fraud claims.

However, the agents have struggled to back up the administration’s claims that hundreds of thousands of potential noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada, California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, CNN reported this month.

The department has also threatened to withhold grant funding from states that refuse to turn over their voter rolls and expressed a willingness to send ICE agents to polling places—even though federal law prohibits armed agents at places where elections are held.