DHS Pushes Unsubstantiated Claims of Non-Citizen Voter Registrations, State Officials Defend Election Integrity
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Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin repeats baseless allegations of mass non-citizen voter registration, despite DHS’s own admission that numbers are unverified. Bipartisan state officials push back, warning that such rhetoric threatens democracy and public trust.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin once again amplified right-wing conspiracy theories on Thursday, claiming that a quarter-million non-citizens are registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. This comes even as his own department’s letters to the states admit the figures are unverified and lack credible evidence. In a letter to Pennsylvania, DHS speculated about the presence of up to 14,576 non-citizens on the voter rolls, with only 8,594 matches in its database, and requested states’ cooperation for further identity verification—a move many see as a pretext for voter suppression.
Election officials from both parties have condemned the federal government’s attempts to seize voter-registration data, warning that such efforts are designed to stoke fears of non-citizen voting and undermine confidence in the upcoming midterms. Courts across the country have repeatedly rejected these politically motivated fishing expeditions, and a judge recently ruled the DHS’s central audit program illegal. Mullin’s threats of fines, penalties, or even imprisonment for non-cooperation echo authoritarian tactics aimed at intimidating state officials and chilling democratic participation.
New Hampshire’s Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan dismissed the Justice Department’s threats, while Washington’s Secretary of State Steve Hobbs rightly called the DOJ letter a “temper tantrum disguised as an official letter.” Idaho’s Republican attorney general also rejected the DOJ’s baseless insinuations of criminality.
The SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) system, which DHS relies on, is notorious for generating false positives and inflated matches, forcing states to waste resources on unnecessary investigations. Nevada’s Democratic Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar denounced the numbers as “wildly speculative,” and Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt emphasized that non-citizen voting is “extremely rare.” Officials in Georgia and North Carolina clarified that the flagged names are merely potential matches, not confirmed non-citizens, and the actual number of votes cast by non-citizens is likely negligible.
Missouri election officials are still working through the citizenship status of more than 1,000 names flagged by DHS, yet the administration refuses to release any data on how many, if any, of these individuals actually voted. The ongoing campaign to inflate the myth of non-citizen voting is a transparent attempt to justify new barriers to the ballot box and erode faith in American democracy.