u/BalanceOrganic7735

August 31, 2026 - Fulltext

The Department of Homeland Security is planning a surge in its efforts to investigate voter fraud in select states starting Tuesday, according to internal federal guidance reviewed by CNN.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has accelerated efforts to make the department a central force in President Donald Trump’s hunt for purported widespread election fraud. DHS has pushed states to share their voter rolls for audit and has vowed to withhold grant funding from those that refuse to adopt a broader set of election reforms.

The department has leaned for investigative work on one of its agencies — Homeland Security Investigations — an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that typically tackles major crimes like human trafficking, drug smuggling and child exploitation. The agency has already surged an unprecedented number of agents to work on cases, including chasing down voter histories of people believed to be noncitizens who may have illegally voted or registered to vote.

Experts say there is no evidence that widespread voter fraud has occurred in recent elections.

Starting Tuesday, HSI is launching a “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative to pursue investigative leads, conduct field interviews, and support timely prosecutorial review,” the guidance says.

Offices in nine states are expected to take investigative action from early September to mid-October, according to the guidance. Those states include Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut.

The guidance’s reference to investigative steps is notable given the push comes as midterm elections get underway. Such “overt” investigatory actions while elections were approaching have historically been discouraged, under long-standing Justice Department policy limiting investigative actions could influence elections.

“Doing otherwise runs the risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities and of interjecting the investigation itself into ongoing campaigns and the adjudication of any ensuing election contest,” the Justice Department manual says. “It may, however, often be appropriate, in consultation with the Public Integrity Section, to share information and allegations involving such matters with state or local authorities where an immediate need for overt measures exists.”

The DOJ formally rescinded the policy under the first Trump administration but still mostly abided by it, and it was reinstated under President Joe Biden.

But DHS, as a separate department, is not obligated to follow the policy, and the new guidance makes no reference to those timing concerns.

“While ICE Homeland Security Investigations is not able to comment on any active investigations, HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” a Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement. “Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders.”

Under the Trump administration, agents have, for example, been assigned to investigate whether naturalized US citizens registered or voted before becoming citizens, CNN previously reported. Another memo directed HSI agents to coordinate with US Citizenship and Immigration Services to begin removal proceedings when a noncitizen is suspected of or linked to voter fraud.

Despite the dramatic shift of resources toward investigating election fraud, the administration has brought only a handful of prosecutions — mostly targeting cases of noncitizens voting or being unlawfully registered to vote.

Still, the administration has touted alleged election fraud arrests. Last week, the Justice Department announced that a Honduran national who was legally living in the United States had been arrested and charged with fraudulently registering to vote and falsely claiming to be a US citizen.

“Today’s arrest is the first of many to come,” First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli said in a statement.

Mullin, meanwhile, has positioned himself as a leading enforcer of Trump’s voter-fraud crackdown. Earlier this summer, his department announced an audit of public voter rolls had identified more than 250,000 registered noncitizens in just four states: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada.

“One thing that I love about numbers, and I love about facts, is they don’t lie,” Mullin told reporters at the time, warning that election officials who fail to secure the midterms could face fines or even jail time.

But the numbers have, thus far, proved far less definitive than DHS initially suggested. The department publicly claimed it had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls. But behind closed doors, the department acknowledged to the state’s top election officials that it had “confirmed” just 185 of them, according to internal records reviewed by CNN. Another 6,200 were labeled “higher confidence matches” — but still required further vetting.

They told you the real threat to free speech was the left. Then Charlie Kirk died, and the same crowd spent a year hunting down everyone who posted the wrong thing about it 600+ people fired, suspended, or investigated, with a sitting U.S. senator and the Vice President personally naming targets and demanding their bosses fire them.

Here’s the part they’re quieter about: it’s collapsing in court. Yesterday an arbitrator ordered the Washington Post to reinstate columnist Karen Attiah — fired last September over posts about race and gun violence — with full back pay. She’s just the latest. A Tennessee professor got $1.9 million. A man jailed 37 days over a meme got $835,000. Another professor got his job back and $500,000 after a senator publicly went after him. The tab is already in the millions, and hundreds of cases are still pending.

The movement that built its whole brand on “you can’t cancel us” just ran the largest speech-policing campaign in years — and one ruling at a time, it’s being told it broke the law. Let that sink in.

Sources:

Washington Post (Attiah reinstated): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/24/washington-post-karen-attiah-black-media-fired/

NPR (broader payouts): https://www.npr.org/2026/08/25/nx-s1-5943079/washington-post-ordered-to-reinstate-columnist-fired-over-charlie-kirk-comments

Relevant as Arizona did not give up their voter database. The only states that will be affected by this are the ones that did not give up their voter rolls to the federal government.

Mail-In voting is holding on by a thread in AZ right now.

M1000 is a Fine nib. It lays down a wet line. I have to refill it every week or two. My M800 is a medium nib. Now that I’ve had the nib tuned, it also lays down a wet and broader line. I can’t remember the last time I refilled it - maybe 2 months ago. I write about the same amount each week with each pen.

Is this a known thing? Any ideas why this would be?

I prefer political leaders who prioritize public health and safety instead of destroying it.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress over his refusal to answer questions during a hearing last week, with the panel arguing he improperly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination since he is already protected from federal prosecution by a Biden-era pardon. Committee Chairman Rand Paul said, “Holding a witness in contempt is a serious thing, and it should be rare. But the contempt power exists for precisely this circumstance,” and the resolution passed 8 to 5, with all Democrats opposing and two more opposing by proxy vote. Rather than routing the matter through a full Senate floor vote, Paul said he intends to send the contempt resolution directly to the Justice Department as a referral, telling reporters, “We will send it to the Department of Justice tomorrow so there’s no delay. That will be a committee recommendation.”

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to every question posed to him during last week’s subpoenaed hearing, part of the committee’s investigation into COVID-19’s origins, doing so 111 times according to Paul. Ahead of the hearing, Paul had released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era journal entries, which Fauci referenced in his opening statement, accusing Paul of an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution” and saying, “The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, ‘behind bars.’” Fauci’s attorney maintained he had “solid legal ground” for asserting the privilege, but Paul argues the pardon question remains legally unsettled, framing the vote narrowly: “We only have one question: Whether to hold a witness responsible for his contempt toward Congress. The witness had many chances to answer the questions pertinent to our investigation, and he made his decision 111 times.”

Democrats pushed back forcefully, with Sen. Gary Peters, the committee’s top Democrat, attempting to table or postpone the vote before it was blocked by the GOP majority, warning that criminal contempt “is punitive” and “does not compel a witness to answer questions or produce the documents we’d all like to see,” adding that it risks setting “a damaging precedent that future witnesses will use to resist legitimate congressional oversight and weaken this committee’s ability to compel testimony.” The resolution directs Vice President JD Vance, as president of the Senate, to certify the report to Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, though any decision to actually charge Fauci rests with the Justice Department. The move echoes a similar approach used by the Democrat-led Congress in 2021 and 2022, which recommended contempt charges against Trump allies Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro over Jan. 6-related subpoenas; both were later convicted and served prison time.

“The CDC says it stopped requiring tracking as of July 1 for everything except Salmonella and shiga-producing E. coli — meaning tracking for cyclosporiasis is now done only by state or local agencies.”

Why are Republicans so gung-ho about harming public health? How does stopping tracking public health risks improve the general welfare of the USA?