With just two weeks until the midterm elections, some fear that the federal government’s pressure on election officials will fuel distrust in the system.
Federal agents have ballots enteredAnd voting machines were examined. The Justice Department is engaged in legal battles with states across the country over information on individual voters and last week threatened to sue California election officials if they knowingly counted the mail-in ballots of 20,000 people who the Trump administration says are “likely noncitizens.”
It’s a kind of interference. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican living in a deeply red state, said she’s never seen it before.
“In the last two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cybersecurity threats and other things,” she said. “But now we also face threats from our own government.”
Actions of the federal government during elections
In the United States, elections are local. They are managed by cities, counties and states. This is stated in Article I of the Constitution. Congress passes laws governing elections, but the president has no role in administering them.
Yet during his second term, Mr. Trump signed two executive orders regarding voting: one requiring documentary proof of citizenship register to vote and another on absentee ballots.
The administration’s latest action came Thursday, when the The Justice Department sued Californiaclaiming it was mailing ballots to more than 20,000 likely non-citizens. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the federal government was threatening the voting rights of thousands of Californians without providing details on how they identified those people, and she questioned the accuracy of the data.
“The Department of Justice’s relentless efforts to illegally access protected state voter data and purge voter rolls only serves to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” Weber said in a statement.
“Non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections,” Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told 60 Minutes. “So the question is just how many there are.”
Requests for electoral lists
Last year, the Justice Department asked nearly every state in the country for their complete voter rolls, including confidential voter information.
“They wanted things that the law generally requires us to keep confidential: Social Security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” said Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, Utah’s elections official.
Henderson told 60 Minutes that she hadn’t received good answers about why the federal government wanted this information, and that she was concerned about what would be done with the data. She refused to hand them over.
Officials in 29 other states – Democrats and Republicans – have also refused to comply with the government’s demands. The Department of Justice prosecuted them all. The Trump administration says access to voter rolls will help purge rolls of immigrant voters who are ineligible to vote. The administration claimed, without providing evidence, that 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. And a White House spokesperson said noncitizens “continue to register and vote in federal elections.”
Non-citizen voting does occur, but it is extremely rare. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said this summer that thousands of people non-citizens were registered in error in its state due to a software problem. About 340 of them actually voted.
Since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has charged more than 100 noncitizens with voting illegally.
Henderson said she found only 52 questionable voters on the voter rolls of Utah’s more than 2 million registered voters.
DHS Secretary Mullin said this summer that any election official who knowingly allows noncitizens to vote could be prosecuted or even sent to prison.
“We’re not going to jail. No. That’s stupid,” Henderson said.
Last month, in writing, the Justice Department told Henderson she was under investigation.
“I have to tell myself that the consequences don’t matter, as long as I feel like I’m doing the right thing,” she said. “I think that’s an important thing for me to do, hold those guardrails, hold the line. Someone has to do it.”
Henderson believes there can still be honest and fair elections. The question for her is whether the losing candidate will accept the results.
“We’re seeing a trend of candidates losing races and now refusing to concede, saying it was rigged, saying it wasn’t fair, even though it’s not close,” she said. “Candidates who lose can do a lot of good by conceding graciously. This will instill public confidence.”
“I never imagined we would be raided by the FBI”
In January, armed federal agents seized ballots from a local facility in Fulton County, Georgia.
“I never in my wildest dreams imagined the FBI would attack us,” Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, a Democrat, told 60 Minutes.
The agents had a criminal search warrant that Georgia’s secretary of state described as being full of “baseless and repackaged claims,” but it allowed them to seize ballots and other election materials from the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed he won. Federal agents in Fulton County packed up more than 600 boxes of election records. Tulsi Gabbard, then director of national intelligence, watched as ballot boxes were loaded into trucks.
Barrett has no idea where the ballots are currently located. She believes that this seizure was “political theater aimed at undermining the elections of 2026 and 2028”.
“I think this is all part of this concerted effort that’s happening nationally to undermine confidence in elections,” Barrett said.
Three months ago, the FBI temporarily reassigned 260 analysts to work on a “priority investigation” into the Georgia documents, according to an internal FBI email obtained by 60 Minutes. So far, the investigation has yielded nothing. There have been dozens of investigations into the 2020 election in Fulton County, but none have moved the needle.
“People see all these FBI investigations and searches and subpoenas and they say, ‘There must be something wrong. Why should I believe the results?'”
The Department of Justice responds
Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the administration is actively conducting new investigations and looking into “thousands” of possible cases of non-citizen voting.
“We have been in power for less than two years. We have been carrying out investigations for more than a year and it takes time,” Dhillon said.
Dhillon said there had been irregularities in previous elections and that a record number of election observers and monitors — more than 1,000 of them — would be at the polls in the midterms to boost voter confidence.
Recent surveys show that only about half of Americans expect the midterm elections to be free and fair.
Dhillon called concerns that Mr. Trump could challenge the midterm results “paranoia.” If a non-citizen votes, that individual vote will be challenged, she said, not the entire election.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Dhillon told 60 Minutes, “but I can tell you that absent some shocking and unexpected eventuality, there should be no interruption in the usual process of counting and certifying results in the states.”
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