DHS secretary doubles down on Trump’s baseless 2020 election claims | Trump administration
U.S. homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin doubled down on Donald Trump’s false election claims on Friday, amid his agency’s efforts to promote the president’s agenda.
During his televised address to the nation on Thursday, Trump used a review compiled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the basis for many false claims.
“This isn’t about rehashing the 2020 election. It’s just about exposing what happened and making sure it never happens again,” Mullin said after the president’s speech was widely criticized for revealing no new information about the safety and security of U.S. elections, despite claiming the system fell “disastrously short” on “magnitude.”
Mullin claimed that DHS identified “250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada.” But election experts, including David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the administration was not “transparent about the methodology” in reaching that number.
On Thursday, several state officials from the states Mullin mentioned responded to the administration’s allegations. Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state, said voters in the Keystone state “should take steps to verify their identity before voting, including providing proper identification when they register to vote, vote by mail or vote at a new polling place.”
He added: “All evidence suggests that non-citizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”
The secretary of homeland security shared letters to four secretaries of state on social media outlining his department’s so-called “findings.” In each letter, Mullin writes that his department’s preliminary review found numerous enrollees in this state whose “name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number match a noncitizen in our files.”
This methodology is problematic for many reasons. First, as Mullin noted, there has yet to be any verification of the identities of the individuals the review supposedly identified. Second, registering to vote and actually voting are two different things; Someone may be registered but not actually vote in a particular election. Because citizenship status can change over time, his department will need to prove that individuals are not citizens at the time of the vote.
On Friday, Mullin also claimed that 28,000 non-citizens had been identified in the voter rolls of more than 20 states that were “proactively” working with the administration on the Save program, a tool DHS implemented to verify citizenship status.
That number seems reasonable, Becker noted, but it’s only 0.04% of the 68 million voters in those states.
“One of the things I love about numbers and facts is that they don’t lie,” Mullin told reporters Friday. “This is not something I’m trying to tell you to twist a narrative. This is what’s happening and what we’re saying is that every state needs to partner with us to secure this.”
Mullin also repeated this throughout the press conference: his threat Cutting off federal grant funding to states that do not attempt to “secure” elections.
“If they’re not willing to do that, that would raise serious questions. It’s not that difficult. It’s not a partisan issue,” the Secretary of Homeland Security said. The federal government has previously attempted to gain access to state voter rolls containing the personal data of millions of Americans. States’ refusal to hand over data resulted in numerous lawsuits that the administration lost.
Mullin also repeated many of the baseless conspiracy theories the president pushed Thursday evening; specifically that voting machines are unsafe and unsafe. This is despite election officials and cybersecurity experts routinely emphasizing that these machines are not connected to the internet and are subjected to rigorous testing before each election to ensure they have not been compromised.
“We are confident that our allies, not our foreign enemies, but our foreign enemies have vital parts of our voting machines,” Mullin said, appearing to echo the president’s claims that the CIA had obtained reports of a “private plot by the Maduro regime” in Venezuela to “digitally rig the Maduro regime’s elections in 2020.”
However, according to CIA analysis, the vulnerability involved voting technology used by Smartmatic in Venezuela and did not involve the United States. Allegations that the Venezuelan leadership controls electronic voting systems around the world, including those used in the 2020 US elections, are part of a long-standing conspiracy theory and are not supported by credible evidence.
On Friday, Mullin said, again without evidence, that opponents “can change voter registrations and change your vote.”
“There’s no question. It’s not even up for debate,” he said.
