ICE investigators want to buy voter data from every state

ICE calls it fraud detection. The files it wants could show, state by state, which Americans vote and how often.

An election judge reaches for a roll of “I Voted” stickers at Woodrow Town Hall on Primary Election Day, Aug. 11, 2026, in Cass County, Minnesota. (Photo: Lorie Shaull)

Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is seeking a private contractor to buy voter registration and voter history files from as many as all 50 states on its behalf.

ICE laid out the plan in a draft statement of work attached to a request for information it posted on SAM.gov, the federal government's contracting portal, on Aug. 25. The agency says the files would support “fraud detection and data segmentation activities.” It does not define data segmentation anywhere in the document.

A request for information is a market research tool. It does not commit an agency to buy anything, and no contract has been awarded. Agencies use them to gauge what vendors can do and to refine requirements before issuing a solicitation. The statement of work is labeled as a draft and contains bracketed placeholders where delivery deadlines and record retention periods would go.

Draft SOW for Voter Data

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ICE would direct the contractor to acquire one public voter registration file per year from each jurisdiction the agency names in writing. The list is expected to be small at first but could grow, according to the document. Whoever wins the work would have to be capable of covering all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.

Public voter history files would also be in scope where states publish them separately, for every federal election the agency specifies. That includes general, primary, runoff and special elections.

What is in a voter file?

Voter registration data is public in nearly every state. According to Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan advocacy group, the public file typically includes a voter’s address, age, precinct, districts and polling place, and the files are routinely used by campaigns, academic researchers and election integrity groups to check the accuracy of the rolls.

Access rules vary widely. The group has documented that Virginia and New Hampshire restrict voter data to campaigns, political action committees, and parties or to political and get-out-the-vote purposes, and that Minnesota and Maryland provide it only to registered voters within the state. Alabama charges more than $37,000 for a copy of its file. Some states refresh the public version only monthly or quarterly.

Those restrictions could matter for the acquisition the draft describes, because a commercial vendor cannot simply buy the file everywhere.

ICE addresses that problem directly.

In a section titled “Navigating Legal Access (State Restrictions),” the agency says that where state laws limit commercial data access but permit law enforcement use, DHS will send the state “Government Interest” or “need-to-know” authorization letters on the contractor’s behalf. The letters would designate the vendor as the department’s acquisition agent.

In plain terms, ICE would use its law enforcement access to get files the contractor could not buy on its own, while keeping the deal structured as a commercial purchase.

The passage is written in the first person, referring to “our designated acquisition agent,” language that does not appear elsewhere in what is otherwise a document addressed to a prospective contractor.

Party affiliation, with an exception

Two separate sections of the draft address political neutrality.

One bars the contractor from prioritizing, delaying, or sequencing acquisitions based on the political characteristics of a jurisdiction or its electorate. The order in which the contractor goes after states must be driven by practical concerns, the document says, such as what is technically possible, what state law allows, or what the schedule requires.

A second section prohibits the contractor from collecting, processing, or delivering party affiliation fields, even when states include them in the files. That prohibition carries an exception. The fields may be delivered if the contracting officer directs it in writing.

The draft also sets out a procedure for stripping party data without breaking the evidentiary chain. The contractor would hash the raw file on receipt, run an auditable script to remove the prohibited fields, hash the sanitized file, and deliver both values with the file. The document says this “maintains a legally defensible audit trail.”

Meanwhile, a parallel effort at Justice

This request appears against a backdrop of fierce federal litigation over voter data.

Since May 2025, the Justice Department has demanded statewide voter registration lists from nearly every state, including records containing Social Security and driver’s license numbers. Most states declined to provide the unredacted files, and the department has filed 31 lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia to compel them.

Twenty-three of those suits have been dismissed, according to Democracy Docket. Courts have so far held that federal election statutes do not require states to hand over the data. In January, the federal court in California found the demands violated federal privacy law. The Justice Department has appealed several of the rulings.

ICE would not take that route. The agency is seeking the public files states already publish rather than the restricted records at issue in the litigation, and it proposes to buy them rather than demand them. A commercial purchase produces no order for a state to refuse and no defendant for a court to hear.

There is already a well-documented nexus between the two departments. At a March hearing in the Rhode Island case, the acting chief of the Civil Rights Division's voting section testified that the department planned to run the voter data it collects against SAVE, a DHS database used to check immigration status, according to a transcript posted by the Brennan Center. The division has a memorandum of understanding with DHS covering the use of SAVE for voter registration and list maintenance.

Project Salt Box asked ICE how HSI would use the acquired files, whether the data would be matched against or ingested into any automated system, under what circumstances the agency would direct a contractor to deliver party affiliation data, whether DHS has sent authorization letters to any state, and whether HSI has received or requested voter data collected by the Justice Department.

The agency did not respond by publication.