Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials on Friday with prison time if they did not comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to change election policies.
He also repeated many of president Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the security of American elections.
Mullin pledged to “dig in just a little bit deeper” than a prime-time speech that Trump gave on Thursday, when the president claimed without concrete evidence that American elections were rife with “hacking, manipulation and corruption”.
The secretary largely stuck to similar talking points, repeating the president’s unverified claim that the government had found hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls in at least four states.
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Neither Trump nor Mullin offered any specifics on how they derived those numbers, and officials in at least two of the states said their voter rolls were properly maintained.
Mullin also repeated claims that foreign actors could exploit vulnerabilities identified in election systems to change votes, despite offering no evidence that such a breach has ever occurred.
Cybersecurity experts and election officials say that such a scenario is extremely unlikely, as voting equipment is generally not connected to the internet and most hypothetical scenarios of tampering would require physical access to machines.
The secretary’s remarks follow an increasingly vocal effort by the Trump administration to use the power of government to bolster the president’s long-held false claims about elections.
Trump’s speech on Thursday, coupled with Mullin’s pledge to continue pressing those false claims, was a significant escalation of such rhetoric and risked creating additional chaos and doubt for election administrators and voters alike as the midterms draw near.
The louder and more aggressive claims come as the president and his allies seek greater control over the levers of the nation’s election infrastructure, despite clear legal limits. The constitution grants the power to govern elections to ongress and the states, and grants no explicit authority to the executive branch.
That did not stop Mullin from increasing pressure on state and local election officials in his remarks on Friday.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has threatened election administrators with jail time. This month, the Justice Department sent letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia threatening criminal prosecution if election officials counted any ballots cast by noncitizens in upcoming elections.
Last year, senior Justice Department officials began exploring whether they could bring criminal charges against state or local election officials.
Mullin’s reiteration of Trump’s claim – that Homeland Security had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania – did not entirely square with a letter the secretary sent to one of those states on Thursday indicating the number was most likely just an initial estimate.
Like Trump and Mullin’s remarks, the letter offered no specifics on how the government had investigated the voter rolls in those states.
“Preliminary review of the records revealed that there may be as many as 14,576 noncitizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania,” Mullin wrote to local election officials in the state, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times. He wrote that the review was based on an “analysis of Pennsylvania’s publicly available voter registration database information”.
Officials in California, Pennsylvania and Nevada quickly pushed back on the claims. “Noncitizen voting remains exceedingly rare,” Shirley Weber, the Democratic secretary of state in California, said in a statement. “In California, election officials work every day to maintain accurate voter rolls and ensure that only eligible voters are registered.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
