Election security

Homeland Security has no archive for Pence panel on illegal immigrants who vote

President’s Trump’s commission plans to place significant reliance on data from the Department of Homeland Security to determine the extent of illegal voting by noncitizens.

But the commission, headed by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, may be in for unpleasant surprises.

Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is perhaps the only government agency that asks legal noncitizen residents, under the penalty of perjury, if they broke the law and registered to vote or voted. It would be one important data point in assessing the breadth of voter fraud across America.

But as The Washington Times found out in a denied Freedom of Information Act request, USCIS does not track and archive such information. There is no compilation for political scientists, scholars or a government commission to research. The Pence commission would have to ask Homeland Security to review every application — nearly 1 million last year alone — to find each reply.