Federal agents on Thursday conducted searches of a group in Ohio that conducts voter registration drives, part of a broader push by the Trump administration to find election fraud that critics have derided as a campaign to intimidate voters.
More than 100 agents with the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. retrieved records or questioned people connected to the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a progressive organization focused on social justice and voting rights, according to Prentiss Haney, a board member with the group.
It was not immediately clear what the investigators were looking for, but Mr. Haney said a handful of members were served with search warrants on Thursday. A much larger pool of past workers and volunteers were questioned by federal agents, he added, as part of an investigation into the group’s voter registration efforts in 2024.
He denounced the investigation as an “escalating attempt to intimidate civil rights leaders,” adding, “We won’t be afraid and we will continue our work.”
Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat running to reclaim a Senate seat he lost in 2024, called the action “a transparent attempt at silencing Ohioans” that would imperil free and fair elections in the state.
“Federal law enforcement should never try to intimidate eligible voters from exercising their right to participate in democracy,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “The F.B.I. should immediately make public any and all activities around these raids in Ohio.”
Officials with the F.B.I. and D.H.S. did not return requests for comment.
The federal searches in Ohio were reported earlier by MSNOW.
The search comes as the Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to pursue voter fraud, particularly any instances of voting by noncitizens or ballot harvesting, meaning when voters deposit ballots for other people.
The president and his supporters have argued such problems are widespread and have affected Republican candidates’ chances of winning. Past investigations and voter data show instances of fraud, but they are exceedingly rare and do not occur in the kind of numbers that would determine winners and losers of specific races.
The Trump administration has provided no evidence of significant voter fraud among immigrants, according to interviews with government officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Officials referred about 10,000 of 49.5 million voter registrations to Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation.
That was roughly 0.02 percent of the names processed.
The overall effort to enlist federal law enforcement in elections is being coordinated, at least in part, by Anthony Salisbury, a top deputy to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s domestic policy adviser and the architect of the administration’s immigration crackdown.
Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
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