US administration cautions states to tighten voting rules

Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

Unable to pass its controversial legislation to tighten voting laws and facing dubious mid-term election prospects, the Trump administration is trying to intimidate state officials into joining its effort to find illegal voters, despite evidence there aren’t many. It’s all part of the effort to increase doubts about the integrity of US elections and force the imposition of restrictive rules that would likely result in reduced voting by the poor, the elderly and minorities.

Administration critics also fear the threats by President Donald Trump and other top officials may be designed to create a pretext for possible federal interference with November’s balloting — like sending troops to monitor polling places or seizing voting machines and ballot boxes in close races — despite the constitutional provision putting the states in charge of elections. After all, the administration’s real goal is helping Republicans avoid a November defeat, just like the earlier moves to redraw congressional district lines.

The administration’s threats followed last week’s prime-time speech in which Trump called the American election system “worse than any third world country.” Without providing any proof, he alleged that some 278,000 non-citizens are registered in four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But neither the president nor Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin explained how they got that number, since those states are among the majority that have refused administration demands to provide their registration data.

A letter to Pennsylvania officials, obtained by The New York Times, suggested they are merely estimates, declaring that its allegation that as many as 14,576 noncitizens are registered there was based on an “analysis of Pennsylvania’s publicly available voter registration database information.” In recent days, both Mullin and the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division have warned state voting officials they could face criminal charges if they don’t act on the administration’s unproven claims of widespread non-citizen voting.

“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. “Any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains non-citizens on the state’s SVRL (State Voter Registration List) or facilitates non-citizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability,” wrote Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. State officials either ignored or dismissed the threats. “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” Utah’s chief election officer, Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, posted on her Threads account. “This is truly bizarre behaviour by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

She said a recent Utah of its more than two million registered voters “found one confirmed noncitizen who never voted and has since been removed by the appropriate county clerk.” Similar studies in other states, including Texas, Arizona, Michigan and Iowa, also showed minimal instances of non-citizen voting. Trump’s speech re-cycled his prior allegations that China and other US enemies have sought to interfere in American elections, especially the 2020 president race which he still won’t concede he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

But he failed to show how this interference affected the outcome or to repeat his oft expressed, but unproven, contention the 2020 election was rigged against him. More importantly perhaps, the so-called “evidence” and misleading statistics in his over-hyped, under-convincing speech suggested that his real concern is with elections he loses.

He reiterated previously disclosed allegations of Chinese interference in the election he lost while he and his allies ran the relevant government machinery. But he ignored what likely were similar Chinese efforts in the more recent 2024 election, which he won while the Democrats ran things. And he failed to explain why he has crippled the very federal agency — the Election Assistance Commission — that is supposed to work with the states to ensure election integrity.

Under the president’s SAVE voting bill currently stalemated in the Senate, states would have to require all registered voters to show proof of citizenship and a government-issued identification. While that sounds reasonable, election experts believe it would disenfranchise millions of older people, minorities, rural residents and women who changed their names when they got married, who neither have such documents nor would find it hard to get them. It also limits the number of permissible IDs. By contrast, Virginia, one of many states that requires voter ID, allows — and Trump’s bill disallows — valid in-state student IDs, nursing home resident IDs, current utility bills, bank statements or paycheques that have the prospective voter’s home address on them.