A lawsuit filed in federal district court alleges the Department of Homeland Security has systematically collected sensitive data on Kentucky voters, despite the state's refusal to share it, Kentucky Lantern reported, in a story first published by Louisville Public Media. The claims are allegations in a court filing and have not been decided by a court.

Source: Kentucky Lantern / Louisville Public Media

In the filing, voting-rights and electronic-privacy groups cited emails and memos obtained from DHS through records requests. The lawsuit points to an email attachment dated July 6, 2026, which said a DHS investigative unit had “enriched” data from Kentucky and five other states, and that the information was “pending Palantir entry into ELITE.” ELITE is a tool developed by Palantir that the company describes as used for “identifying the location of known foreign nationals who meet criteria for removal.”

The groups paired that memo with a recent federal whistleblower disclosure warning lawmakers that DHS employees are being told to use “voter data of dubious origins” compiled with what the whistleblower called “supplemental magic.” Broader reporting on the same lawsuit says the plaintiffs — including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the League of Women Voters and the League of United Latin American Citizens — allege DHS obtained voter records covering a large share of the roughly 174 million registered voters in the United States, combining them with commercially purchased data-broker records.

Source: AllAboutCookies

Kentucky's position

A spokesperson for Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said the office is not a party to the suit but offered assurances that Kentucky's voter rolls have not been improperly accessed or altered, and said it would not affect Kentucky's elections even if the federal government developed its own voter file. Earlier this summer, courts dismissed Justice Department lawsuits against Kentucky and many other states after election officials refused to hand over unredacted voter data containing confidential information; afterwards, the Justice Department said Adams was “under investigation” for not complying with federal demands.

“We see this as an attempt to work around what courts have found is a violation of the Privacy Act,” Marcia Johnson of the National League of Women Voters said about the lawsuit against DHS. Johnson added that if voting data is used by immigration enforcement agents, it could have a chilling effect at the polls in November: “I could be a citizen, I could be eligible, but I could be concerned about being prevented from voting.”

For Punjabi and other immigrant families in Kentucky — including naturalized citizens — the case goes to a practical question: whether appearing on a voter roll could expose a family's data to immigration-enforcement systems. The lawsuit remains an allegation at this stage, and no court has ruled on whether DHS broke the law.