The New York Times reports:

Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders by posing as voters as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday.

The authorities also required agents to meet quotas, which afforded them a mere 12 minutes to review each voter record. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, the whistle-blower said in a nearly 30-page report.

The whistle-blower report, provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, offers an inside view of the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” The New York Times revealed last month the existence of the operation, which has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour voter rolls managed by the states 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.

Democrats and voting rights activists have denounced the operation as yet another way Mr. Trump, who has acknowledged the headwinds Republicans are facing as they try to retain control of Congress, is trying to sow doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections. They fear that eligible voters could be disqualified from participating in the fall midterms, or, worse, that Mr. Trump will use the investigation to try to discard actual results.

“This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” Mr. Schumer, the minority leader, said in an interview. He added: “We’ve never seen anything quite like this. They come up with so many different ways to try and steal the election, to try and jaundice the election, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do.” [Continue reading…]