WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday threatened state election officials with possible prison time if they don’t comply with Trump administration methods to determine whether noncitizens are on voter rolls.Subscribe to read this story ad-freeGet unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Expanding on President Donald Trump’s election speech a night earlier, Mullin said that the Department of Homeland Security had preliminarily determined there were more than 250,000 noncitizens on voting lists in at least four states: California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Mullin demanded states run their voter rolls through a federal database maintained by DHS to determine if noncitizens were on lists and said if they don’t, they won’t be able to access federal grants.But the use of the DHS database — which was historically for assessing immigration benefits — has been blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that repurposing it for this effort violated rules on the disclosure of Social Security records.The database has also proved to be error-prone when used to evaluate voter rolls.
It often flags newly naturalized citizens as noncitizen voters.Voting rights experts say the use of the database is flawed and could result in registered voters purged from rolls.“We need to make sure that individuals that are legally able to vote are voting,” Mullin said from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House.
“If you’re illegal and attempted to vote, or you tried to vote illegally for someone else, we will find you and we will charge you.”The secretary’s comments come as the Trump administration is increasingly using the levers of government to sow doubts about the nation’s electoral system as the midterm elections draw near.“If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments,” election law expert Rick Hasen wrote.“Trump has been hounding ...