Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will build a massive national database of voters, according to a document published by Wired last week. The acquisition is intended to support fraud detection and data segmentation activities within Homeland Security Investigations, ICE's investigative arm. Experts believe the effort will violate privacy rights for American voters.
The contract requires the successful bidder to handle and securely deliver publicly available voter registration files and voting history files from states across the country. ICE will initially provide a list of specific states from which it wants to acquire public voter registration files, though the contractor must have the capability to obtain data from all 50 states. The agency is also seeking voting history data for each federal election specified by the government, including general, primary, runoff, and special federal elections. An acquisition forecast document published Monday revealed the contract would be worth between $2 million and $5 million, with the final contract expected to be published next Monday and likely awarded soon after, given that the term expires on September 30.
The document states that the successful contractor won't be asked to collect and share party affiliation data fields for voters, but that could change if explicitly directed in writing by the contracting officer, listed as Michael Royer, section chief at Homeland Security Investigations. According to the report, ICE's effort to create a national voter database is part of a much broader effort within the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to undermine trust in the upcoming midterm elections. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers called DHS's plans "a joke," stating that Trump "needs to stay out of it because voting is a state issue and not a federal issue."
This isn't ICE's first attempt to access voter data or investigate alleged fraud. In July, 404 Media reported that ICE was set to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its CLEAR database, a platform that brings together names, addresses, property records, driver's licenses, social media profiles, and voter registration records from both public and private sources. In June, Axios reported that ICE agents had obtained individual voter rolls from election officials in two counties in Texas and North Carolina. Last year, Wired reported that DOGE was building a master database using data from DHS as well as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida. A senior DHS official told Wired at the time that "they are trying to amass a huge amount of data," adding that "it has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending." The official noted they are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data. Despite assertions from DHS and the Trump administration, incidents of noncitizens voting are vanishingly rare, with an investigation in Georgia this week finding very few examples. The convergence of immigration enforcement authority with election oversight creates novel institutional pressure points that could reshape federal-state dynamics well beyond this contract's narrow procurement scope.