Exclusive: FBI gets voter's IP address in new fraud probe tactic

The Trump administration has a new tactic for trying to isolate cases of alleged voter fraud — digging into the IP addresses of those who went online to register to vote. The FBI recently obtained the IP address of someone who registered online in South Carolina, according to documents first shared with Axios. Why it matters: The bureau's request for the address, which state and local officials complied with, offers a glimpse of how federal authorities are stepping up their probe of voter rolls and registration practices under pressure from President Trump. The president's persistent complaints about the 2020 election have expanded into federal investigations that also involve the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. It's unclear how often the FBI plans to take the extraordinary step of seeking IP addresses, but its push in South Carolina has broad implications nationwide: 43 states allow some form of online voter registration. An IP address would show a user's geographic location and service provider, but not their specific identity. It could tell whether the user was outside a state or even the U.S., for example. Trump has claimed that operatives in China and elsewhere have tried to influence U.S. elections. The big picture: As the bureau investigates South Carolina, ICE has been requesting voter data in Texas and North Carolina. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is trying to get voter rolls from states that have resisted sharing registration information, and is suing 30 states and Washington, D.C., for that access. Critics say it's a federal intrusion rooted in Trump's baseless claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. "The administration has gone down every rabbit hole, pursued every possible avenue to undermine the confidence in the integrity of the federal election process and to undermine the process itself," said Robert Weiner, former senior counsel at DOJ's civil rights division and director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. Driving the news: An FBI agent in South Carolina stepped up the probe there in March by asking state and local officials for the IP address of a voter's online registration, according to emails revealed in a public records request by Democracy Forward, which shared them with Axios. The email exchange between the FBI and the general counsel of South Carolina's State Election Commission is partially redacted. The general counsel didn't respond to a request for comment. Another exchange, under the subject line, "Voter Investigation" shows the FBI agent receiving the voter's digital information in June. The FBI didn't respond to several requests for comment. What they're saying: "It is not common" to get this kind of request, York County (S.C.) election official Alan Helms told Axios. "In my tenure as an election official, going on 20 years, that is the first interaction with law enforcement." Helms said his office complied with the request, as is permitted under the law. "It's not typical for the FBI to be calling state election officials and just asking and conducting a fishing expedition to see private voter data," a former senior Justice Department official told Axios. "It's not typical and it's not appropriate." Ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dillon has sent a letter warning election officials about statutes that ban non-citizens from voting in federal elections. DHS general counsel James Percival issued a memo asking immigration officials to use any voting-related crimes as evidence in deportation proceedings for noncitizens. Dillon's office also announced it would send poll watchers to three Arizona counties ahead of that state's primary on July 21. Zoom in: Since the Trump administration claimed to have found hundreds of thousands of voters registered illegally or deceased across the U.S., New Jersey has revealed that about 6,600 noncitizens had registered to vote because of a software error. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherill (D) said her team's investigation so far has removed about 4,500 people from the state's voter rolls, and that some people initially identified as ineligible actually might be eligible to vote. Trump's administration is holding up New Jersey, a Democrat-led state, as an example of a state with election issues and is trying to force it to share its full voter rolls with federal investigators. So far, it's resisting. Flashback: A similar software issue was investigated in North Carolina in 2021. The state found about 700 potential noncitizens had registered and more than 100 of them had voted in 2016. No charges brought in most cases because the registration error was no one's fault. In some cases, voters were registered despite acknowledging on a DMV form that they weren't citizens. Others were registered after leaving the question blank.