July 17 (UPI) — The Department of Homeland Security on Friday ramped up the Trump administration’s efforts to address what the president claims are lapses in election security, threatening state officials with prison time if they don’t comply with federal demands.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters in Washington he would apply “maximum pressure” against states that refuse to work with his department.
The Trump administration has focused on noncitizens allegedly casting ballots, which experts say is extremely rare, and the possibility that voting machines can be hacked — although they are, by design, never connected to the internet.
“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 told reporters.
Mullin’s remarks come a day after President Donald Trump, in a primetime address, enumerated a series of debunked claims that the U.S. elections are rigged or have been influenced by foreign governments.
“Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost,” Trump said Thursday. “This cannot be allowed to continue.”
Mullin said DHS has found more than 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — and sent letters to their respective secretaries of state seeking answers.
“Before and after the election, we will scrub all election records looking for illegal aliens and those who are ineligible to vote, including those that somehow voted yet they were deceased,” Mullin said. “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.”
In its letters, DHS did not accuse any of the noncitizens of having actually voted.
“We will pursue maximum pressure on this,” Mullin told reporters. “To let you know, we will be proactively looking at early voting, and then after post-election, we will continue to scrub all those that did vote.”
Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of state in Pennsylvania, said, “All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country,” including in his state.
“In Pennsylvania, every voter must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place,” Schmidt told The Hill.
In Nevada, Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said the administration’s efforts are intended to undermine elections.
“The administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work,” Aguilar said in a statement. “They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.”
