5 ms·
ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud
- add-sub-mul-div 3mo agoI found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_phone_call https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
- ivell 3mo agoBecause there are no consequences of Trump's actions, he would continue to commit offenses. Neither Biden's administration, nor the judge presiding over Trump's crimes did what should have been done. The checks and balances failed both when Trump was in power and when he was not in power.
- cosmicgadget 3mo agoYou conclusion is true but how you get there is deeply flawed. With the recent immunity ruling and the impossibility of the Senate upholding impeachment, yes, the president can basically try anything he wants.
- pjerem 3mo agoBut that's not nazi because Trump have no mustache.
- MemoryHoleHQ 3mo ago[dead]
- baggachipz 3mo agoBatshit insane. Does this mean they need to "find" it, like how he wanted to "find" more votes in Georgia?
- VeninVidiaVicii 3mo ago“Find” in the sense of “find me the man and I’ll find you the crime”.
- solfox 3mo agoI reckon that if you replace "find" with "make", you might be closer to the truth about what this data will be used for.
- sixothree 3mo agoSo the fraud perpetrated here will be this administration denying people their right to vote?
- hightrix 3mo agoMy guess is the fraud they are looking for vs the fraud they find will not at all be related. If they find the fraud at all, it will be entirely the current administration at fault.
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoMy bet is that they'll find a few jurisdictions where the voting rolls or other paperwork were altered in a way that runs afoul of some reconstruction era laws. The root cause will likely ultimately be metric gaming. They'll find a few more people from Chicago, New Jersey and the other "usual" places who did "real fraud", likely at the local and party primary level and immaterial to federal elections. This is technically election fraud, not voter fraud, but that won't matter. They'll flamboyantly prosecute everyone they can, maybe for a dozen total, and declare it a success before moving on to the next shiny distraction
- Forgeties79 3mo agoThe boring truth is they’ll find nothing and the admin will pretend it never even looked. They’ve done this already with all the “very real and provable voter fraud” they investigated in previous elections. All the initiatives quietly disbanded after saying they found nothing. They can’t even say they’ve found evidence when pressed https://newrepublic.com/post/213185/trump-election-fraud-guy-john-solomon-found-no-proof https://newrepublic.com/post/213185/trump-election-fraud-guy...
- sanex 3mo agoPretty sure you're supposed to get a warrant to access private information. I don't know how we ended up in this place where somehow paying for info precludes the necessity to get a warrant a la flock, cell tower data, etc.
- doctoboggan 3mo agoThe legal argument is that we gave this data "voluntarily" to the data broker so the government no longer needs a warrant. This is an area that desperately needs new laws to catch up to the reality of what is going on, but I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.
- wat10000 3mo agoThe government never needs a warrant merely to ask for info, and a private entity doesn't need a warrant to voluntarily hand over info that they have. If we had decent privacy protections then a private entity couldn't decide to just hand over whatever data they have on others, but, well, we don't.
- paulryanrogers 3mo agoIncreasingly it's becoming necessary to disclose data to private entities just to survive and live a reasonable approximation of a normal life. Why have constitutional protection against search if in practice nothing can be shielded from such searches?
- fhdkweig 3mo agoEvery once in a while a company will publicly push back on such requests, but I feel it is getting rarer. Public libraries are a good example of places that still care about privacy, but companies that have to worry about going out of business because of a heavy-handed government tend to cave easily.
- esseph 3mo ago
- njovin 3mo agoIf you're a California resident, under the CCPA you can submit a request for Thomson Reuters to both provide you with and then delete any information they have collected about you. The state's even setup a nice portal to automate these requests across 600+ data brokers. https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/ https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/
- goodluckchuck 3mo agoSince they are working for the Federal government here, doesn’t the supremacy clause trump state law and allow them to deny / retain that data?
- Grombobulous 3mo agoIs there a federal law with supremacy over the state law? My layperson’s understanding is that there would need to be something in existing federal law that forces retention. Not just some executive order, government contract, or executive policy. A company could defy state law but they wouldn’t be protected from state level civil and criminal charges. There’s not much of a mechanism for the federal government to do anything about that.
- ktm5j 3mo agoThis may be an unpopular opinion, but is this really the best way to respond here? Won't this just give them the opportunity to claim that California is doing this specifically to hide fraud? $125 mil is a drop in the bucket compared to ICE's budget, if they want to spend it like this why not just let them? Thomson Reuters has an excellent track record of being impartial/non-partisan.. maybe we could finally get past the nonsense election rigging claims. Just my 2c
- saghm 3mo agoThe type of people who have been worked up about supposed voter fraud have rejected all existing evidence, so I don't know why you'd expect this go do any differently. Let's not forget that ICE has already admitted to lying directly to courts about the justification for their actions[1]; there's absolutely no reason to enable them in digging for more info. At absolute best, they're in a wild goose chase based on our speculation, but more plausibly they'll either lie about the results or try to use it for entirely unrelated purposes. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/ice-lawyers-justify-detaining-on-false-information https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/ice-lawyers-...
- epistasis 3mo agoThis is shocking and scary amount government over reach, to fabricate evidence of something that everyone knows is false... We are really through the looking glass here, folks. Watch the confirmation hearings where potential appointees are asked to simply state factually who won the 2020 residential election. The amount of dissembling, avoidance, and inability to say that the emperor has no clothes..... it's just shocking. This sort of rank corruption, of turning a government against its own people to subvert democracy... that more people aren't out in the streets about this makes me quite angry. We live in a state of continual shock of how bad things have gotten, I guess
- wat10000 3mo agoThe problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.
- RajT88 3mo agoAgree. Signs and flags around my neighborhood after 2020, "Trump won, you know it and I know it". ETA: Why the downvotes? It's true, and I have photos of the signs. These people exist.
- epistasis 3mo ago(We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)
- RajT88 3mo agoTalking about social media strangeness. I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account. Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.
- flumpcakes 3mo agoUS politics is cooked. I wonder if polymarket will start taking bets on mid-terms being canceled.
- moate 3mo agoWhy would you wonder that: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-2026-midterm-elections-happen-as-scheduled https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-2026-midterm-elections... Of course they are.
- gcanyon 3mo agoWow, 97% that there will be elections. That's high, but if you handed me a gun with a 3% chance of being loaded and offered me a billion dollars to point it at my head and pull the trigger, I would not. My foot on the other hand...
- wat10000 3mo agoI don't think it's high at all. Elections are required for almost any legitimate government these days. Russia has elections. China has elections. North Korea has elections. The question is not whether there will be elections, but whether they will be free and fair.
- gbear605 3mo agoIt's worth noting that Polymarket (and all other prediction markets using money) has some fundamental problems that cause inaccuracy. Most notably here, the elections are still several months out, so you're asking people to put up 97 cents to get a dollar back in three months. But for that time frame I could also put 97 cents in treasuries and get 98 cents back, so the market won't be accurate within 1% of reality, and treasuries are considered a good deal safer than Polymarket. In addition, there can be issues related to fees, Kelly betting (if the correct bet is 98%, don't want to bet all the way to 98% or you have no returns and you definitely don't want to put all of your wallet in on it in case it goes against you), and so on. So this isn't a "3% chance of the elections happening" it's "3%, plus or minus the rate of return over three months, plus or minus all the other related issues". I don't know if that gets you down to zero percent, but it definitely gets you closer. (Yes Polymarket has tried to do some things to resolve these issue, no they don't work very well.)
- thomascgalvin 3mo agoAh yes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that famous election security wing of the US Government
- ceejayoz 3mo agoWe called them Sturmabteilung in the original German.
- nozzlegear 3mo ago> Sturmabteilung: German, literally 'storm division.' A German Nazi paramilitary force formed in 1921, whose members were known in English as Brownshirts. The ICE comparison is spot on, IMO.
- garciasn 3mo agohttps://archive.is/2L3sU https://archive.is/2L3sU More information: Target Data Collected According to procurement records initially reviewed by 404 Media, the system allows continuous monitoring of the following personal data points: [1] Names and addresses Social Security numbers Ethnicities Geolocation information Social media activity [1] https://www.change.org/p/demand-thomson-reuters-cancel-its-125-million-ice-voter-surveillance-contract https://www.change.org/p/demand-thomson-reuters-cancel-its-1...
- croes 3mo agoIs ICE the correct agency for voter fraud?
- jzebedee 3mo agoNo, of course not. They have zero domestic police authority for US citizens.
- FireBeyond 3mo agoMeanwhile they run around pulling people over for "traffic violations" and then pulling a "Your taillights are out, and papers, please."
- moate 3mo agoWhatever the conclusion of "is ICE the correct agency for..." the answer is no. But you use the brownshirts for things regular civil servants would gum up with protests and procedure adhering to the actual law.
- hightrix 3mo agoNo. But framing them as such is setting the stage for them to be involved in the upcoming midterm elections. That's the whole point of this fishing expedition.
- stldev 3mo agoThat's the one murdering innocent civilians in the streets? That's the one locking up thousands and denying basic human rights? No. They're not the 'correct agency' for anything.
- cassepipe 3mo agoNo, it's the FDA's role, as everybody knows
- vaadu 3mo agoICE will say their mandate in this context is to ensure that non-US citizens are not on state voter rolls. ICE knows illegals are less inclined to register to vote knowing that ICE monitors voter rolls.
- dofm 3mo agoHas this always been ICE responsibility?
- tencentshill 3mo agoOf course not, but ICE is the weapon of choice. A loyal, armed goon squad seemingly unconstrained by law compared to other agencies.
- superkuh 3mo agoAnd now the FBI has announced they will not investigate any crimes that ICE commits.
- jeffbee 3mo agoICE is less than 25 years old.
- dofm 3mo agoOf course, sorry but — rephrasing slightly for clarity — has it been their bailiwick since they were created? Like, is illegal voting an immigration law violation, or is this just Trump projecting a new responsibility onto his independently funded army?
- jeffbee 3mo agoAdjudicating whether an individual is eligible to vote is not and has never been the domain of any federal agency. It is categorically none of their business. The only federal intervention in elections that the Constitution permits is for the executive branch, traditionally through the Department of Justice, to ensure that states are not improperly preventing voters from voting, via the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments.
- luxuryballs 3mo agoWell there's obviously at least some amount of fraud and a lot of people with eyes on it so finding it seems like the best course of action at the moment, mostly due to the latter since millions of people trusting the elections is pretty important AND if they are verifiably secure it prevents people from running their mouth about it and swaying anyone to distrust them (had to get ahead of it). But really if you compare the US with the first country your mind thinks of when you think if trustworthy elections we have a long way to go and spending money and time looking for the weak spots is the correct start. This is an example of the minimum viable amount of effort that should go into this: "Belgium who was little known that time received more votes than mathematically predicted. So the members of the counting authority took out the magnetic cards and started counting again. After several hours they found that the vote total for every candidate was exactly the same before except for Maria Vindevogel. For Maria Vindevogel, the number of recounted vote was less than the original by 4096 number of votes. How this inflation in votes becomes possible even? What went wrong? Computer experts were brought in to run extensive tests to check the programme. They combed through the code but no bug was detected. Then they tested the hardware again and again." https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(1).pdf https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...
- HEmanZ 3mo agoSo much of this noise tho bakes in the assumption that we weren’t already doing voter fraud detection. If my parents are a decent gauge, this is the entire lie the right wing is trying to push: that there has never been rails against voter fraud. That there isn’t a massive amount of machinery already preventing it. And, by acting like “oh now we’re doing something” and ignoring prior work it allows them to put on a captivating dog and pony show for the base that desperately wants to believe the elections are rigged. It would be like declaring “we are taking the big step of installing smoke alarms in every school in America!” when there are already smoke alarms in every school. You just want the political noise for a base that is too dumb to realize you’re not doing anything new.
- luxuryballs 3mo agofor the sake of the smart ones can we at least check? or how much intelligence does one need in order to qualify as a citizen worthy of trustable elections?
- jmyeet 3mo agoWhen I was young, I thought mandatory voting was silly. It made uninformed people vote. Well, certainly in this case, I was the uninformed person because seeing how non-mandatory voting works (in the US) should convinced everyone that voting should be mandatory. The history of the US is one of voter suppression. Women couldn't vote. After Emancipation, barriers were put in to stop black people from voting (so-called "grandfather" laws). We got the Voting Rights Act for a reason. Many reasons actually. All the way back in the Reagan era we had the Republican Party engaging in voter disenfranchisement with, for example, the Ballot Security Task Force [1]. This was part of the reason why we needed federal preclearance until John Roberts and his Heritage Foundation henchmen decided that it was impossible to prove racism or disenfrachisement. We continue this by not only removing the voting rights of felons (which should be unconstitutional) but we pass around lists of names of felons and strike off people from electoral rolls for having names that sound similar to that of a felon from a completely different state. There is no widespread voter fraud. There is widespread voter disenfranchisement. All of this is just a pretext for stealing elections. We'll se on January 3rd if the current House Speaker refuses to certify results and swear in new members when the Republicans lose in a landslide. Or we see more shenanigans like in the 2020 election to overturn the presidential election. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force
- Varelion 3mo agoThis process has been carried out, publicly, a few times. Every time the results not only fail to support the current regime's narrative, they actively goes against it. So, the question becomes: "Who is getting kickbacks for this 'deal'?" More importantly, how in the hell it this under the purview of ICE? Agencies and units have strictly outlined mission statements they are not supposed to go outside of. What kind of secret police nonsense it this? EDIT: Word choice & spelling
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- pstuart 3mo agoICE is Trump's private army, and their only loyalty is to him (and Stephen Miller, who's actually the puppet master here). All of this is a painful lessons that institutions are not things, they are agreements and if someone with enough power does not agree than the institution is reshaped by that disagreement.
- imglorp 3mo agoThey are trying to confuse voter fraud with election fraud so they can justify ICE election interference in November. There are only a small handful of voter fraud cases per year: someone tried to vote for a dead relative or whatever. Never enough to change an outcome. https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/how-many-cases-of-actual-voter-fraud-fd9c98 https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/how-many-cases-of-... On the other hand, potentially far more impactful is election fraud and election interference. Tampering with voting machines (Coffee GA, Tina Peters etc), paying voters (Musk in PA), asking a state to "find more votes" (GA), ...
- stldev 3mo agoThis isn't about "finding" fraud. This is about instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt.
- wnevets 3mo agoIts time to abolish ICE.
- ansuman441 3mo agoThere are lot of ways to do it, but the biggest challenge is will they do it? like it's mostly a descision rather than capabilities.
- jimnotgym 3mo agoICE have jurisdiction over elections now?
- aqme28 3mo agoThat's what happens when you make them the most highly-funded police force in the world. They start looking around for new jurisdictions.
- cosmicgadget 3mo agoICE shipping out to Hormuz when.
- ck2 3mo agoOur country is now a clown show Heritage Foundation, you know those super-left liberals, already did this and found like a hundred votes max over a decade and most of those were pure accidents and not intentional fraud, certainly not able to sway elections even by accident I previously felt there was a suitable purpose for a small tiny ICE like Obama-sized era But now I'm with the abolish folks, it's 100% irredeemable and between them executing people without repercussions and a budget larger than many critical organizations, just delete them completely and start over.
- gcanyon 3mo agoIf they will pay me $10 million I will guarantee to find voter fraud or refund half their money...
- JSR_FDED 3mo agoIt’s Cyber Ninjas all over again
- cosmicgadget 3mo agoAnd Cyber Symposium. Oh man, those were the days, when "ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!" claims were met with laughter instead of Joe Rogan saying "wild".
- vrganj 3mo agoHow is this immigration enforcement? I see they're no longer bothering to even put up the slightest bit of pretense ICE is anything but Trump's brownshirts, a group of goons to brutalize and intimidate any opposition to his antidemocratic project.
- legitster 3mo agoThe product we're talking about here is CLEAR. And one of the deep ironies is that CLEAR is already highly deployed at the state level, among other things, to verify voter identity and prevent voter fraud! DHS and ICE also ostensibly already use CLEAR for a variety of other purposes - what's novel here isn't that they are getting access to new data, it's that they want to backseat drive on investigations the states are already conducting, using only a subset of the data the states already use.
- dweinus 3mo agoWhy is this flagged?
- thrance 3mo agoHN ownership is complicit. They've been censoring everything "political" recently, as it becomes harder and harder to rationalize this regime's exactions. Used to be that such links would show up in the front page of /active daily, now there can be weeks without any passing by.
- comrade1234 3mo agoWould be nice to get in on some of this grift...
- xtiansimon 3mo agoWaste, Fraud, and Abuse.