Trump administration officials took only minor steps Friday to follow through on the president’s demands for a crackdown on alleged voter fraud, while repeating his widely disputed claims that election systems are vulnerable to abuse.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in a news conference the day after President Donald Trump delivered a primetime speech on election security, said the department would withhold federal funding from states that don’t “scrub” their voter rolls of ineligible voters and participate in the administration’s other election security initiatives.
Mullin also made vague threats to hold election officials accountable if they refused to cooperate. He suggested fines and prison time were possible and vowed that authorities would charge anyone attempting to vote illegally.
“States must do their part to secure our election system, and we stand by to help,” he said, insisting that states participate in a contested DHS program known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
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Mullin’s remarks rehashed threats and assertions Trump made in his speech Thursday night, including baseless claims that U.S. election systems are catastrophically vulnerable to foreign adversaries.
Election experts, state officials and some lawmakers heaped criticism on the administration’s election narrative Friday, with many calling it a revamped attempt to undermine confidence ahead of a midterm election that could result in heavy Republican losses.
“This is what panic and desperation is like,” David Becker, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters Friday morning. “They are just trying to grab as much garbage as they can and throw it up against the wall, and it’s not sticking.”
Becker said many election officials have privately shrugged off, or even laughed at, the administration’s previous warnings about possible prosecution for failing to follow Trump’s directives. He also pointed to the administration’s string of losses in court cases challenging the Justice Department’s attempt to force states to turn over voter data, saying judges so far had firmly rejected Trump’s attempts to nationalize elections.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA, was similarly dismissive of the administration’s prosecution threats, including those involving allegations that states had turned a blind eye to voting by noncitizens.
“If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments,” Hasen wrote on the Election Law Blog. “Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that he hasn’t shows that these claims likely have no legs.”
On Friday, Mullin sent letters to the top election officials in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — states where the administration purported to have identified more than a combined quarter-million noncitizens on voter rolls.
Trump said in his speech he had directed DHS to tell officials in every state to immediately remove any ineligible voters. But the batch of letters from Mullin were far less confrontational, merely calling on the targeted states to work collaboratively with Homeland Security officials in the effort. They gave states until July 30 to respond.
The letters also appeared to undercut Trump’s claims of just how many noncitizens the administration’s analysis turned up. A letter to Pennsylvania, said there “may be” about 14,600 noncitizens registered to vote in the state, while noting that of those, officials had found 8,600 whose name, date of birth, address and Social Security number matched a noncitizen in the agency’s files.
DHS hasn’t publicly explained how it arrived at its numbers, and the letters didn’t contain any accusations that states had actually allowed noncitizens to vote. Noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare, and there is no evidence that it has occurred on a wide enough scale to tip the outcome of an election. Even if the agency’s statistics are accurate, they would represent a small fraction, likely less than 1 percent, of registered voters in the states.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, responding to the letter he received, called the administration’s numbers “wildly speculative at best” and said DHS “hasn’t shared anything that backs it up.”
Aguilar and other election officials, including Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt and California Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, said they had properly maintained and updated voter rolls and noted the layers of verification they require before allowing voters to register or cast ballots.
“The Administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work,” Aguilar said in an emailed statement. “They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.”
Weber said in a statement that California officials “welcome legitimate best practices that comply with state and federal law while protecting Californians’ personal information. However, the information provided during the President’s remarks and on the White House website, do not inspire any level of confidence in the methodology used or the conclusions reached.”
The controversial SAVE system that Mullin wants states to use originally was created to verify the immigration status of people applying for government benefits. Since the start of Trump’s second term last year, DHS has been transforming it into a searchable, national citizenship system by linking various government datasets to it, raising concerns about the potential for it to lead to eligible voters being disenfranchised.
DHS has connected data from the Social Security Administration to the system despite the fact that SSA itself has said its data isn’t meant to serve as a record of U.S. citizens and doesn’t include all U.S. citizens. SSA’s former general counsel, Tina Waddell, also recently told NOTUS that “Social Security numbers are not verification of citizenship.”
Kathleen Romig, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who works on Social Security issues, told NOTUS in a statement that the data SSA has on citizenship “is not complete or up to date.”
“Using SSA data to verify voters will create errors and risks disenfranchising eligible U.S. citizen voters ahead of the midterm elections,” Romig said.
In some of the states using the system already, it has flagged hundreds of U.S. citizens as potential noncitizens already. Over 20 states have used the system so far, Mullin said Friday.
Last week, DHS threatened to withhold election security grant funding if states don’t use the system.
The SAVE system is currently at the center of conflicting federal court rulings over its use of Social Security numbers, with one judge ruling that the administration’s revamp of the system broke privacy and administrative laws — and another ordering DHS to make the system available to Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio in part so they can ensure noncitizens aren’t on their voter rolls.
Use of the SAVE system or other government databases to comb voter rolls for noncitizens is also mandated in the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, also known as the SAVE Act, which has stalled in the Senate because of a lack of Republican support. Trump on Thursday again called on Congress to pass a version of the measure.
The Trump administration is also pursuing another, similar effort to cobble together lists of eligible voters under an executive order issued in the spring that directed DHS to create state-by-state lists of eligible voters. Government officials in the agencies charged with implementation, however, are skeptical that the Trump administration could feasibly assemble these voter lists by November, if the endeavor survives in the courts.
“DHS’s push for widespread use of SAVE has stoked baseless fears about voter fraud that make our elections less trusted and less safe as we head into consequential midterms,” said Tim Harper, who works on elections issues at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
“If DHS truly wants to protect election integrity, it wouldn’t condition federal cybersecurity assistance on the use of a faulty system like SAVE while threatening to leave election officials to fight sophisticated nation-state cyber attacks without help,” he said.
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