Dhs Secretary Vows Fines — And Even Prison Time — For Election Officials That Don’t Comply

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday said officials who don’t cooperate with the administration’s election security efforts may be slapped with fines — and potentially prison time.

“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 during a press conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Mullin also vowed that DHS would work to "make our security enhancements mandatory” for states. He promised to withhold federal election security grants until state officials take steps the administration demanded, including running their voter registration lists through a system that checks for non-citizen voters on the rolls.

Mullin’s remarks built on President Donald Trump’s Thursday night primetime speech about election security, where he rehashed already-understood concerns about the security of voting systems, described efforts by China to access voter rolls and aired old grievances about the result of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

The DHS secretary on Friday focused his speech on DHS efforts to work with states to secure election systems and to scrub voter registration lists for fraud as well as concerns about noncitizen voting.

Mullin’s warnings, as well as Trump’s speech, fit into a pattern of broader escalation from the Trump administration over elections, especially as the president ramps up his legislative push for an overhaul of the U.S. election system and voter registration. The administration’s push to assert control over the country’s generally decentralized election system has worried election officials, who say the effort can undercut confidence in the system.

The Justice Department also sent letters this month threatening to prosecute election officials across the country who fail to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls.

During his speech, Trump claimed that DHS had uncovered tens of thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls in four states, though as Mullin said on Friday, DHS does not have evidence of any actual voting by these noncitizens. Mullin said officials plan to go through these voter records one by one to determine if any actually voted.

Mullin appeared to suggest on Friday that the agency was able to estimate the numbers by using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system and said 23 states are already working with DHS to analyze voter rolls. And he criticized the legal challenges slowing the administration’s efforts: A judge last month blocked the Trump administration from establishing a database of Americans’ information — including social security numbers and citizenship status.

Most election experts believe that while non-citizen registering to vote — let alone cast ballots — happens, it is rare and not at the scope that the Trump administration is seemingly suggesting.

And election officials and security experts have criticized using the SAVE system, arguing it drastically overestimates the number of non-citizens who may be on the rolls due to false positives.

Mullin also announced that DHS cyber officials and officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will soon unveil an “updated election infrastructure plan” to provide further election cybersecurity resources to states. Spokespeople for CISA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the plan. Election security programs at CISA — the agency that led election security coordination at the federal level during recent federal elections — were largely frozen early last year amid a review by DHS.

The administration also continued to cast the issue as one of domestic accountability rather than foreign retaliation, despite Trump’s claims Thursday that China’s ability to access voting information is dangerous – even though there is no evidence that the state actually changed any votes.

Asked Friday whether China would face consequences over the allegations, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters the issues were “separate lanes,” arguing that “this isn’t a story about China.”

He instead painted it as one about “the American refusal at the political level to safeguard our election system,” adding that “there are nefarious actors domestically who wanted that 2020 election to go in a different way.”