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ICE has your voter file | WTF America - media kit | WTF America - Dataspheres AI

Three weeks before the midterms, this is the story that got one news cycle and then went quiet. We put the pieces together. Watch ICE has your voter file (...

Three weeks before the midterms, this is the story that got one news cycle and then went quiet. We put the pieces together. Watch ICE has your voter file (8 min), with captions The stories 99 million So here is the number. 99 million voter records. Where does that come from? From ICE itself. On October 7 a group called Democracy Forward released 166 pages of internal ICE records it won through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. A June 1 report from Homeland Security Investigations, ICE's criminal investigative arm, says it had ingested 50.6 million voter records from a Justice Department dataset, and another 48.4 million from what it calls independent sources. And 154 million people voted in 2024. So even one of those sets is a third of everyone who voted. Records ingested, not unique voters; the two sets can overlap. But the scale is the point. Where the 99 million came from Break the two sets apart for me. 50.6 million came from a Justice Department dataset. CNN reports that may include the unredacted voter lists more than a dozen Republican-led states handed over voluntarily. The other 48.4 million came through Heather Honey, a senior counselor to the Homeland Security Secretary, from sources the report does not name. CNN says that may be public voter lists DHS bought from California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada. And the report itself never says who those independent sources are. It does not. Hold that question; it comes back. Who assembled it Who is Heather Honey? A Pennsylvania election researcher. In 2020 her analysis claimed Pennsylvania had more votes than voters, which was wrong, and President Trump repeated it on January 6, 2021. NBC News reported her appointment to a DHS election integrity post in August 2025. Today she is senior counselor to the DHS Secretary. And the operation around her? HSI describes it as a phased national initiative: acquire voter rolls, analyze the data, generate leads, send investigators into the field. Weekly reports went to ICE leadership, and they tracked the primaries as they happened. The map nobody drew Okay. This is the part nobody has put in one place. Walk the timeline. December 2025: DHS links a citizenship system called SAVE to Social Security records and opens bulk checks of whole voter rolls. June 2026: a federal judge halts that as a privacy-law violation. The same month, HSI's report counts the 99 million records and says undercover agents may be used against nonprofits that register voters. July: an HSI report says voter data from six states is pending entry into Palantir's ELITE, the tool ICE uses to locate people for deportation. Palantir told CNN voter data has never been integrated into it. September 25: the Supreme Court revives SAVE, six to three, while the case continues. And this week: the Justice Department gave California 48 hours, then sued it over 20,000 so-called likely noncitizens who had already been mailed ballots. Each of those got its own story. The line through them did not. Find your state: who gave DOJ their rolls Find your state. Where does mine sit in this? Three lists. The Justice Department has sued 30 states to force over their unredacted voter rolls. More than a dozen Republican-led states handed theirs over without a suit. And DHS told the Supreme Court it ran 65 million voters across 26 states through SAVE and flagged 28,635. And HSI's own priority list? Ten states: Texas, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Ohio. If you live in one of those, your roll was a priority. How accurate the flags are Now the insight. How good are these flags? Nevada is the clearest case. DHS first told the state it had found about 15,900 noncitizens on its rolls. After re-examining, DHS cut that to 185. Nevada then checked those 185 and found every one was a US citizen. DHS disputes Nevada's conclusion. Texas flagged 2,724 people out of more than 18 million voters, under 0.02%, and some of them already had citizenship documents on file. ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found DHS had to correct what it sent to at least five states. So the tool finds very few, and some of the few are citizens. What is in a voter file And what is actually in the file they hold? Your name, your home address, your date of birth, your voting history, your party. An unredacted roll can carry driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. And a lawsuit filed October 15 says DHS combined records from at least 47 states with data bought from commercial brokers. Which is more than most people think their registration says about them. The other side In fairness, what does DHS say? To CNN, a spokesperson said the department has been incredibly transparent about acquiring and analyzing publicly available voter files, and that DHS and DOJ are laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of citizens' votes. The case for it And the case for it is not nothing. The Su