What Was Released
REPORTED. On Oct. 7 the legal group Democracy Forward released 166 pages of Homeland Security records it obtained through a public-records request filed in April. They include weekly reports to ICE leadership. CNN reported that a June 1 report from Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE, said investigators "had ingested 50.6 million records from a Justice Department dataset and another 48.4 million records" that the report credits to "independent sources of information." The New York Times, working from the same records, reported that the department investigated more than 150 organizations it suspected of helping noncitizens register, and considered sending undercover agents to "disrupt" them.
What the Numbers Do Not Say
REPORTED. CNN says the document does not name the independent sources. It says the Justice Department dataset may include unredacted voter lists that more than a dozen Republican-led states handed over voluntarily, and that the other batch may include public lists from California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada that DHS bought. It does not say whether either figure counts unique individuals, so 99 million records is not 99 million people. The Justice Department has sued 30 other states for their unredacted rolls, per CNN. CNN also reports that investigators "found no derogatory information on dozens of New Jersey groups they examined," so the nonprofit reviews did not all end in a finding.
REPORTED. The second batch is attributed to Heather Honey, whom CNN describes as a senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and who has promoted false claims about the 2020 election. Democracy Forward's release describes obtaining records from her sources as a "strategic line of effort." The Old Goat did not verify what she supplied or how she got it.
What Homeland Security Says
REPORTED. A DHS spokesperson told CNN: "DHS has been incredibly transparent about the acquisition and the analysis of publicly available voter files," and that "DHS and DOJ are laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote." That is the administration's position and it should sit next to the numbers. Noncitizen voting is a real federal crime and checking rolls against immigration data is a lawful aim in the abstract.
The Earlier Number
REPORTED. In July, Mullin said DHS had identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states. The breakdown reported at the time was 190,832 possible registrations in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania, and the figures were called preliminary. The Old Goat read a claim that a later review in Nevada brought the count down to 185 people, all lawful citizens. He could not find that in any source he opened and does not rely on it. If it is true, it is the difference between a match list and a verified list, which is the whole question.
The Observers
REPORTED. The OSCE's election-observation office said on Sept. 23 it regrets that the United States has not invited it to observe the Nov. 3 midterms. It has observed every federal election since 2002. Human Rights Watch calls it a rejection; other outlets say there was simply no invitation. Both can be true: a government that does not send the invitation has rejected the observers without saying so. Russia and Belarus have also withheld invitations in recent years.
What the Old Goat Thinks It Means
This part is opinion, labeled as opinion. A federal law-enforcement agency now holds, by its own report, tens of millions of voter records, and the public has the existence of the pile and not the rules for using it. Several states publish party registration in their voter files. If any of these records include it, an agency holding them could do with them what any data buyer does: sort people by how they are likely to vote. That is the Old Goat's INFERENCE, and it rests on a premise the reporting does not establish, namely that the records include party and that anyone has used them that way. Nothing released says so.
What the release does show is a pattern worth watching in the next three weeks: the files were collected months ago, the investigations into registration groups were running through the summer, and the observers are not coming. Counter-evidence, plainly: DHS says the files are public, much of what is described is routine data matching, many of the nonprofit reviews found nothing, and no record shows anyone being kept from a ballot.
A list is not an accusation. But the person holding it decides what it becomes.
The Old Goat will look for the Democracy Forward documents themselves and update this page with what the pages say about the unique-person count and the use of the data. The Old Goat's dashboard carries the rest of the election-window tracking.