Documents obtained by the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward through a Freedom of Information Act request show that the Department of Homeland Security looked into whether it could feed voter roll data into a Palantir-supported enforcement tool, WIRED reports.
The tool in question is ELITE — Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. First described by 404 Media in January, ELITE lets ICE agents build maps of potential deportation targets, pull up files on each person and see a 'confidence score' for their current address. In a May 26 internal email with the subject line 'Voter Fraud,' a worker in ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit wrote that its Innovation Lab — known internally as iLab — was processing Justice Department voting roll data and USCIS data, with criminal histories currently excluded. 'Coordination with iLab continues,' the worker wrote, 'particularly on ingesting processed voter roll data into the ELITE enforcement system to enhance lead management, analytical review, and investigative tracking.'
A July 7 email with an attachment named 'Fraud WAR' said Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Michigan and New Mexico had 'been enriched by the iLab and are pending Palantir entry into ELITE,' per WIRED. What exactly was enriched is unclear from the records. A Palantir spokesman told WIRED, 'Voter roll data has never been integrated into ELITE.' ICE said it does not disclose investigative methods, DHS said it is 'actively rooting out and investigating election fraud,' and the White House did not comment.
Experts read the language as groundwork for the future rather than a live deployment. 'You would want to build off of what already exists, what might already have the infrastructure and data sources that you would want,' Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School, told WIRED. The documents also reveal that DHS officials investigated more than 150 nonprofit groups for allegedly helping noncitizens register. The push is framed by the administration's claim that noncitizen voting is widespread — a claim for which, WIRED notes, all available evidence shows the practice is vanishingly rare.
