Trump's Homeland Security Secretary Threatens State Election Officials With Prison Unless They Screen Voters Through A Database A Federal Judge Has Already Forbidden Him To Use

WASHINGTON. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced Friday that the state officials responsible for administering America's elections could personally face fines, penalties, and prison time, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that the people who count the nation's votes still feared no one in particular.

In letters dispatched to secretaries of state across the country, Mullin demanded that each official run their voter rolls through a federal Homeland Security database originally built to verify eligibility for immigration benefits, warning that states declining to do so would lose access to federal grant money. Officials who received the department's findings and failed to act, he added, could be prosecuted individually. "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, describing the threat of imprisoning the referees as a routine step toward securing the game.

The department said it had preliminarily determined that more than 250,000 noncitizens were present on the voter rolls of California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, a figure it arrived at using a database that a federal judge has already ordered the government to stop using for exactly this purpose, on the grounds that repurposing it violated federal disclosure rules. The same system, election experts have noted, routinely flags newly naturalized citizens as noncitizens, meaning the tool assembled to find illegal voters is most reliable at identifying Americans who recently became legal ones.

"The instruction is very simple," said one official within the department, speaking on condition of anonymity because the court order is still technically in effect. "Take the list a judge told us we cannot share, cross-check it against voters the list is known to misidentify, and then arrest whichever county clerk hesitates. We are not sure how elections were ever run before this."

The announcement arrived one day after the President interrupted primetime programming to warn the nation that its elections could be rigged, a sequence administration sources described as unrelated, coincidental, and also the entire point. Constitutional scholars observed that threatening criminal charges against the local officials who tabulate results represented a novel approach to election security, in that it secured the outcome rather than the vote.

At press time, secretaries of state in four of the accused states reported that the federal database had flagged as suspicious several thousand voters, a review of whom was ongoing but had so far turned up a retired schoolteacher, two veterans, and the naturalized citizen serving as one state's deputy elections director.