ICE emails show its investigations unit readying voter roll data for a Palantir-supported tool

An agent who opens ELITE gets a map of potential deportation targets, a file on each person and a "confidence score" on that person's current address, according to 404 Media's January reporting on the Palantir-supported tool ^[10]. The score tells the agent where someone probably lives. A May 26 email in the records Democracy Forward obtained through FOIA ^[5] describes a new feed for that screen. Its author, whose name was redacted ^[9], wrote that coordination with the lab continued "particularly on ingesting processed voter roll data into the ELITE enforcement system to enhance lead management, analytical review, and investigative tracking" ^[8].

The email tells its readers the tool will manage leads and track investigations ^[8]. As reported, what the tool does for the person using it is put a likely address on a map ^[10]. An address score cannot tell an agent whether the person living there was eligible to vote. The inputs named in the same email are DOJ voting rolls and US Citizenship and Immigration Services data ^[7]. Both are government records, and the vendor's part in these documents is the software ^[10].

The July 7 update came as an attachment called "Fraud WAR" (WAR usually means weekly activity report). It listed the six states as enriched by the lab and "pending Palantir entry into ELITE" ^[2]. That was 42 days after the May 26 email ^[18]. A Palantir spokesman told WIRED: "Voter roll data has never been integrated into ELITE." ^[1] A state pending entry has not been entered, so both statements can be accurate on the same day. What was enriched is unclear from the records, WIRED reported ^[3].

The agencies added little. ICE said it "does not disclose the existence of investigative methods and techniques" ^[12]. A DHS spokesperson said HSI "is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found" ^[13]. The White House did not comment ^[14].

Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School who has tracked ELITE, described what ICE appears to be building as "a system that is going to get good at determining how to find people to investigate and potentially bring action against" ^[19].

For anyone who owns or sells a lead-scoring product, the first question the July email raises is whether the score was built for the question the new data raises. The second is whether the data is in production or still in a queue. A score built for the question, with data in production, is a working product; with data queued, it is a routine rollout. A score built for a different question, with data in production, gives agents names with a number attached that looks like evidence. With that data still queued, the system's owner can still refuse the load. On the records, ELITE was in that last position as of July 7, and Palantir says the data has not gone in since ^[2][1].

I'd hold a vendor to a statement at that stage, covering the queue as well as the database. The tradeoff is that Palantir would then be describing a client's investigative methods, which ICE itself declines to disclose ^[12].