Cervantes Statement on Unlawful Voter Initiative by the Department of Homeland Security

“The whistleblower report shows the depths that the federal government is willing to descend into in their efforts to dismantle our democracy piece by piece—now by impersonating members of the public to access voter information, likely in violation of state laws. California will not allow our sacred right to vote to be attacked this way, and to that end, I will introduce legislation when the Legislature reconvenes in December to address this flagrant violation of our democracy.”

According to The New York Times

As reported by The New York Times today, a 30-page whistleblower report, Unlawful Voter Initiative, alleges that agents of the federal Department of Homeland Security posed as voters as part of an expansive effort to search for noncitizens on voter rolls in states across the United States. 

The operation relied on questionable data and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are lawfully eligible to vote, the whistleblower said in the report. The New York Times also reported in August that “the operation has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour state-managed voter rolls in a widespread hunt for evidence of voter fraud. The investigation stems from President Trump’s longstanding fixation on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing the practice is vanishingly rare.”

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