Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has said that state election officials who do not comply with the administration’s election directives — including sharing their voter rolls with a federal immigration database — would be subject to fines and even prison time, and that states declining to participate would lose access to federal grants. The people who run American elections responded directly. On a recent conference call hosted by CISA, the federal cybersecurity agency responsible for helping states protect election infrastructure, one election official asked the agency’s leadership: “why should we trust working with you all as an agency when your boss says that he wants to jail us?” The exchange, reported by Votebeat, captures where federal-state election relations stand with the November 3 midterms 78 days away: the federal department that houses the government’s election security mission is simultaneously the department whose secretary has raised the possibility of prosecuting the officials it is supposed to help.
What Mullin Said
Mullin, the former Oklahoma senator who leads the Department of Homeland Security, said ahead of the midterms that election officials in states that do not “participate in securing the elections” could face consequences that include fines and prison time. The compliance he described has two parts: implementing administration directives on the security of voting machines, and running state voter rolls through a federal database maintained by DHS — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, which was built to let agencies check immigration status when people apply for government benefits. Mullin said states that decline would be unable to access federal grants. He paired the demands with a claim: that DHS had “preliminarily determined” there were more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter lists in at least four states — California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
The Claim Behind the Demand
The 250,000 figure is disputed by the officials who actually maintain those voter rolls. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber called the claims “fallacious” and unsubstantiated, noting that noncitizen voting “remains exceedingly rare” — a characterization consistent with years of state audits and academic research, which have repeatedly found noncitizen registration and voting to occur at vanishingly small rates. Voting by noncitizens is already a federal crime. Election administration experts have also long noted that the SAVE database was not designed for voter list checks: it verifies the immigration status of people who appear in immigration records, which means naturalized citizens can appear as noncitizens if records lag, producing false matches when the database is run against voter rolls. DHS has not published the methodology behind the 250,000 figure. The four states named — two heavily Democratic, two among the most closely contested in the country — are all states where the administration has pressed election-related demands before.
The Call
CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, created in 2018 largely in response to foreign interference attempts in 2016 — convened state election leaders this month for a briefing on midterm security. According to Votebeat’s reporting, the call was tense. Officials pressed acting CISA Director Nick Andersen and senior official Jim Harrell about Mullin’s statements, with one asking why officials should trust the agency “when your boss says that he wants to jail us.” Another participant described the briefing as feeling more like “security theater” than practical help. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told the CISA officials he had no confidence in the agency’s leadership. Participants said the agency offered no concrete support commitments for the 2026 election. PBS NewsHour, covering the call, noted it took place with the election under 90 days away.
What CISA Used to Do
For most of a decade, CISA’s election work was the rare federal function state officials in both parties praised: vulnerability scans of registration systems, threat intelligence sharing, physical security assessments of election offices, and coordination channels for election night. That capacity has been sharply reduced. The administration cut CISA’s election security programs and personnel, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, has pressed DHS over reports that CISA is failing to provide election security support ahead of the midterms. The result, visible on this month’s call, is a trust gap running in both directions: states report getting less help than in prior cycles, from an agency whose parent department’s secretary has said the officials asking for that help could face prosecution if they do not comply with its demands.
Where Things Stand
Whether the administration attempts to act on Mullin’s statements — through prosecutions, grant conditions, or formal directives — remains to be seen, and any attempt would likely land quickly in federal court. The courts have so far been unreceptive to federal assertions of authority over state election administration: Trump’s mail voting executive order is blocked in all 50 states as of last week, an appeals court upheld the block on the federal voter list demand this spring, and a court blocked the Justice Department’s demand for New Jersey’s voter database last year. The Constitution assigns the administration of elections to the states. The people Mullin says could face prison are, in most cases, the same officials federal law directs to maintain their own voter rolls. The People’s Podium will follow what DHS does next — and what the states do in response.