Trump DHS using unverified figures to attack election officials on non-citizen voting

CNN

By Tierney Sneed, Gabe Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration is escalating its attacks on election officials in key battleground states, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin doubling down Friday on claims that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are illegally registered to vote – claims that the agency has quietly acknowledged aren’t fully vetted.

In a news conference, Mullin repeated the claim first made in a release of documents alongside President Donald Trump’s primetime Thursday night speech, alleging that DHS had found a cumulative quarter-million non-citizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

However, letters from DHS to the states informing them of the allegations are more hedged.

Mullin’s letter to Pennsylvania, for instance, notes that the figure is unverified. It says that there “may be as many as 14,576 non-citizens on the states voter rolls,” but that 8,594 came up as matches as non-citizens on its files. It asks for Pennsylvania’s help on working “collaboratively on identity verification” to more efficiently “ensure the accuracy of our findings.”

The Trump administration is attempting to force states to hand over sensitive voter data so that the Justice Department can audit their voter registration files. State election officials of both parties have told CNN they fear that the administration would use the data to exaggerate the problem of non-citizen voting, as a way to sow doubt about the midterm results, if Republicans fare poorly.

The administration’s data-collection effort has run into major legal hurdles, with more than a dozen courts siding with states that have refused to provide their voter rolls to the federal government and a separate judge ruling that the DHS program that is central to the audits is illegal. Mullin railed against that ruling Friday while also threatening election officials with prosecutions for not participating in the DHS voter roll reviews.

“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,” Mullin said.

The Justice Department made a similar threat earlier this month in letters to all 50 states that were quickly dismissed by election officials, many of whom were gathered at a conference in South Dakota during Trump’s speech.

“I’m not intimidated by that at all,” New Hampshire’s Republican Secretary of David Scanlan, whose state recently secured the dismissal of a DOJ lawsuit seeking the data, told CNN Thursday.

“I see this is a temper tantrum disguised as an official letter because they have hit roadblocks,” added Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat.

Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office responded with a sharp letter of its own, telling DOJ its “insinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken.”

The citizenship data system that DHS is using to review the rolls – which is known as SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) – has a reputation for presenting an inflated picture of registered non-citizens. DHS explicitly requires states that use the program voluntarily for voter list maintenance do further investigations of its matches.

Mullin did not include any of that context in his remarks, nor did he describe the 250,000 number as potential non-citizens, as DHS did in its press release announcing the letters to the four states.

“We can affirm that on its face, we refute these claims,” Nevada Democratic Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told CNN in a statement Friday. “These numbers are wildly speculative at best and the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t shared anything that backs it up.”

The administration has not put out information about how many of those individuals it thinks actually voted, but Mullin said Friday DHS officials are investigating the matter.

“All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday night. “While the Department has made clear that we cannot share Pennsylvanians’ private, personal information, we welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims.”

Additionally, DHS is touting tallies of non-citizens that it says were found on the rolls of Republican-led states by using SAVE. However, even those statistics appear to be not fully verified.

Election officials in Georgia and North Carolina said the DHS statistics represent individuals flagged as possible noncitizens — not confirmed noncitizens on the rolls — and the true number could prove far smaller after further review.

In Georgia, officials said only about 120 of the 2,549 flagged individuals have ever voted in the state.

And Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, told CNN earlier Thursday earlier Thursday that election officials in his state were still verifying the citizenship status of the 1,000-plus names flagged in the DHS review.

CNN’s Fredreka Schouten contributed to this report.

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