GOP officials pan Trump’s claims of shocking new election threats

Four days after President Donald Trump declared Dozens of state election officials from around the country gathered in Boston to say their administration had uncovered “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”

But with only 15 weeks until the midterm elections, they were not there for an emergency summit to deal with the so-called crisis.

Instead, these election officials from 37 states gathered for a long-scheduled professional conference that, as always, struck a striking tone. In fact, Trump and his prime time speech barely came up at all.

In interviews with CNN, more than a dozen election officials from both parties said Trump’s speech did not reveal much new in terms of evidence. A few GOP officials even mocked his presentation, pointing out: data The administration issued this statement to support its claim that large numbers of noncitizens voted in U.S. elections.

Republican Matt Crane, who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues included “a lot of laughing emojis and ‘Are you kidding me?’ He said it was full of things like that.” That was all.”

A GOP official from a state Trump won three times also panned his speech; intelligence reports Trump said he had created an “unprecedented election security nightmare” with threats from China and Venezuela. (Trump did not mention that the reports made clear that neither country interfered with the US election results.)

“I have read the documents,” the official told CNN on condition that his condition not be specified. “It was old. I had already seen these things. It wasn’t new to me. We already had most of this information.”

Democratic officials and election experts have condemned Trump for, in their view, escalating his longstanding attacks on the voting process and accused him of laying the groundwork to cover up possible GOP losses this November.

Many Republicans running the elections are much more cautious in their public comments; He supports Trump’s stated goal of purging voter rolls and preventing illegal voting, while also protecting the records in his states.

But in private conversations, many people condemn Trump’s actions.

“We all know the election wasn’t rigged, but we have to keep our heads down and do our job,” a Republican election official told CNN on condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to anger the Trump administration.

I push back on Trump’s data

The president’s speech last Thursday and a subsequent presentation by the Department of Homeland Security singled out some states that allegedly had surprisingly high numbers of noncitizens on their voter rolls.

Trump has long peddled false and fantastical claims that thousands, perhaps even millions, of undocumented immigrants vote in U.S. elections. There are isolated cases, but extensive research from right-wing and left-leaning think tanks concludes that this is happening on a small scale.

Still, the administration said it reviewed publicly available data and found hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on record in Democratic strongholds of Pennsylvania and Nevada, as well as California and New Jersey. Some officials in those states called for more transparency and wanted to know how DHS arrived at those numbers.

Even some red states that voluntarily turned their voter rolls over to the Trump administration for review are caught up in the president’s latest move. The administration said there were more than 28,000 noncitizens in states with GOP election officials.

The DHS citizenship database used to review voter rolls, called SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, has a record of overestimating the number of registered noncitizens. DHS acknowledges that states that voluntarily use the system to maintain voter rolls should further investigate any matches.

Sam Hayes, the GOP executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which has aggressively supported many of Trump’s election policies, said his team would not sign off on the administration’s findings. He said the state, which DHS claims has 1,599 noncitizens on its books, will do its own verification, which takes time and requires contacting registrants.

“There’s nothing that we’re agreeing to on the face of it, and we’re starting to remove people from the voter rolls,” Hayes told CNN. “We need to do our own independent assessment of this. … We still need to do our due diligence.”

Hayes also coolly responded to Trump’s request for a quick response, saying: “It’s going to be difficult to get this done by the midterms, but we’re working toward that goal.”

Georgia election officials told CNN that claims about noncitizens on the administration’s lists appear to be exaggerated. They said only 20 of the 2,549 registered people flagged by DHS had voted in the state.

Despite questioning the White House data, officials in both parties emphasized that they take seriously their duty to keep noncitizens out of the rolls.

Governor of New Jersey It was announced on Tuesday He said a software bug at the state Motor Vehicle Commission mistakenly added about 6,600 noncitizen voter rolls and 400 people voted improperly in the recent election.

A surprising statement from a Democratic governor in a liberal stronghold made instant waves and said “I told you so” accusations From the Trump administration.

Ignores Mullin’s threats

At a news conference Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened fines and even possible “jail time” for election officials who do not comply with Trump administration demands for voter rolls and other election overhauls.

Election officials told CNN they were taking those threats seriously, especially after seeing the Trump-era Justice Department indict many of his political opponents. But officials also said their focus was on their own business.

“‘Can I be made an example of?'” said Crane, a Republican who runs Colorado’s bipartisan election clerks union. “There is concern,” he said. “But I think it’s just generally become white noise at this point.”

A Democratic elections administrator from a battleground state told CNN on condition of anonymity that she received a concerned call from her mother after hearing Mullin’s comments that election officials would likely be sued.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department sent similar warning letters to all 50 states. Idaho’s Republican attorney general was among those who pushed back. rebuke In a sharply worded response letter, the Justice Department stated that “implications of criminal violations of federal election laws were not well received.”

“Stop threatening your friends in Idaho,” wrote James Craig, a leading attorney for the Idaho attorney general’s office.

A GOP election official from another state told CNN that even some officials in red states don’t feel safe because of the Trump administration’s unpredictability.

“It is extremely worrying that they talk like this and we have no idea what they will do,” the official said.

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