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VA AG: DHS May Have Violated Law 09/18 06:17
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- Virginia's attorney general said Thursday that the
Department of Homeland Security may have violated several state laws after a
whistleblower accused its employees of misrepresenting themselves on voter
lookup tools to hunt for noncitizen voters.
In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Attorney General Jay Jones
demanded that DHS confirm in writing whether it had directed anyone to access
Virginia voters' information without first obtaining permission from those
voters.
"Virginia Election Code does not permit disclosure of this protected
information to the federal government without a court order," he wrote in the
letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The state explicitly
limits its voter lookup tools to individuals who attest under penalty of law
that they are looking up their own records.
The AP has asked DHS for comment on the letter.
Jones also asked Mullin to preserve all related records, including access
logs, correspondence and training materials mentioned in the whistleblower
report.
The anonymous report, published Monday by Democratic Senate leaders,
includes transcripts of a DHS training for a group of U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services staffers, who it says were forced in late August to drop
other work, complete a less than two-hour training and begin running
DHS-provided lists of people through state voter registration systems to find
"unlawful voters."
The whistleblower contends that agents have been asked to review 40
individuals per day, giving them about 12 minutes to determine whether each
person is a legal voter and create federal records of anyone who is not.
President Donald Trump's administration has alleged that noncitizen voting
could be a significant source of fraud in the November midterm elections, even
as research shows voting by people who are not citizens is extremely rare. The
Justice Department has sued to force the release of detailed voter data in 30
states and the District of Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those
cases.
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