States that work with President Trump to clean up voter rolls can receive more taxpayer money to help, but those that refuse could face fines and penalties. The administration is threatening “prison time” for the leaders of states that ignore evidence of noncitizens on their lists.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin delivered the carrot and the stick Friday, a day after Mr. Trump proclaimed that the nation’s voting systems had “shocking vulnerabilities.”
Mr. Mullin said some states’ voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation by foreign enemies and that states must patch their systems.
He said his department’s cybersecurity agency will release guidance later this summer and will condition future election grants on state fixes.
He told states to work with the department to scrub their voter lists to delete names of dead voters and noncitizens.
For states that do not cooperate, he said his department will try to review the public data and spot bogus names on their lists, and it will review their records after the elections to see what happened.
“We will go through those records one by one, and we will pursue everybody,” he told reporters.
He said state officials could face financial penalties or “even, depending on how far it goes, prison time.”
The department also released more details of Mr. Trump’s claim that more than a quarter of a million noncitizens’ names have been found on voter rolls in its preliminary reviews. That includes 28,000 names from 25 states that have cooperated with the department, running their voter lists through a department system that can screen for legal status.
It also includes another 250,000 names from four states that have not cooperated but where the Homeland Security Department used publicly available files.
The department said it identified 190,832 names in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania that were flagged as potentially invalid.
Mr. Mullin, in letters to the four states, gave them a two-week timeline to work with him on plans to clean their lists.
The flagged numbers for the noncooperating states are startlingly high compared with those of cooperating jurisdictions.
Texas, one of the states that ran its own list with the department, found 2,296 noncitizens registered out of more than 18 million voters. That was 1 in every 10,000.
If that same rate applied to California, the state would have about 2,800 noncitizens on its rolls, far fewer than the more than 190,000 the federal government said it found in its “preliminary reviews.”
In his letter to Nevada, Mr. Mullin said his department specifically identified 8,576 people whose names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers matched those of noncitizens listed in the department’s own files.
The letter did not say what caused the other roughly 7,300 names to be flagged.
Just because a name is on the voter rolls does not mean that person has cast a ballot in a federal election, and proven cases of illegal voting by noncitizens are rare, averaging in the low double digits a year.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, called the federal numbers “wildly speculative at best.”
“We’ve proven time and time again that Nevada runs some of the safest, most secure and accessible elections in the country,” Mr. Aguilar said.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said his state requires voters to present identification to register and that noncitizen voting was “extremely rare.” Still, he said he was open to looking at the Homeland Security Department’s work to “evaluate the validity of these claims.”
Nearly all states rely on voters to self-attest to their citizenship, under penalty of perjury. The states generally do not seek any further evidence.
The 1993 Motor Voter federal law, which mandated that state motor vehicle bureaus offer voter registration to customers, has complicated the enforcement landscape.
A glitch in Pennsylvania’s system, for example, prompted noncitizens to register to vote even after they told the computer they were not citizens. The glitch lasted more than 20 years, until a 2017 fix.
In 2018, Pennsylvania state officials sent letters to nearly 8,000 registered voters asking them to confirm their eligibility.
California has downplayed the notion of noncitizens on its voter rolls.
When The Washington Times sought records of noncitizen voters last year, the California secretary of state’s office reported that it did not “have any data to report on instances of noncitizens voting or being incorrectly registered and removed from the voting rolls.”
Local jurisdictions, though, have acknowledged the issue.
Last year, Orange County notified the federal government that it had removed 17 people from its voter rolls after realizing they were not citizens. The county said it investigated after receiving complaints from noncitizens that they received ballots in the mail under California’s all-mail election system.
Mr. Mullin said his goal is not to rehash the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump has claimed was stolen from him, or to scare voters, but to build confidence in voting moving forward.
“We’re not trying to change the outcome; we’re trying to make sure the American people can trust our voting system,” the secretary said.
Regarding threats to voting machines, Mr. Mullin said the government has proof that foreign adversaries can access U.S. systems.
“We know that they can change voter registration and your vote,” he said. “We know it’s possible. It’s not a question. It’s not even for debate.”
He did not say more about the specific threat, but the White House on Thursday posted a declassified U.S. intelligence analysis reporting that Venezuela’s Maduro regime sought to develop the capability to adjust the vote counts on voting machines so that wrong results were reported back to central election officials. The CIA memo concerns Venezuela’s domestic elections, and the link to U.S. voting-machine vulnerability is inferential.
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