With midterm elections just two weeks away, there are concerns that the federal government’s pressure on election officials is breeding distrust in the system.
Federal agents have seized ballots, and voting machines have been examined. The Justice Department is locked in legal battles with states across the country over information about individual voters and this past week threatened to prosecute California election officials if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from 20,000 people the Trump administration says are “likely noncitizens.”
It’s a kind of interference Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican in a deeply red state, said she’s never seen before.
“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things,” she said. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”
Federal government actions on elections
In the U.S., elections are local. They’re run by towns and counties and states. It’s stated in Article I of the Constitution. Congress makes laws regulating elections, but the president doesn’t have a role in running them.
Still, during his second term Mr. Trump has signed two executive orders around voting: one requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and another on mail-in ballots.
The administration’s latest move came Thursday, when the Justice Department sued California, claiming it was mailing ballots to more than 20,000 likely noncitizens. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the federal government was threatening the right of thousands of Californians to vote without providing any detail about how they identified those individuals, and she questioned the accuracy of the data.
The Justice Department’s “relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” Weber said in a statement.
“Noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections,” head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon told 60 Minutes. “So the question is simply how many of them there are.”
Demands for voter rolls
Last year the Justice Department asked nearly every state in the country for their full and complete voter rolls, including confidential voter information.
“They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” said Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who is responsible for Utah’s elections.
Henderson told 60 Minutes she wasn’t given good answers about why the federal government wanted the information, and she was concerned about what would be done with the data. She refused to turn them over.
Officials in 29 other states — Democratic and Republican — have also refused to comply with the government’s demands. The Justice Department has sued all of them. The Trump administration says access to voter rolls will help purge the lists of immigrant voters who are not entitled to vote. The administration has alleged, without providing evidence, that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote. And a White House spokesperson has said that noncitizens “continue to register and vote in federal elections.”
Noncitizen voting does happen, but it’s extremely rare. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said this summer that thousands of noncitizens were mistakenly registered in her state due to a software glitch. About 340 of them actually voted.
Since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has charged more than 100 noncitizens with voting illegally.
Henderson said she found just 52 questionable voters on the rolls out of more than 2 million registered voters in Utah.
DHS Secretary Mullin this summer said that any election official who knowingly allows noncitizens to vote could be prosecuted, or even sent to prison.”
“We’re not going to prison. No. It’s silly,” Henderson said.
Last month, in writing, the Justice Department told Henderson she was under investigation.
“I have to tell myself it doesn’t matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I’m doing what’s right,” she said. “I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guard rails, holding the line. Someone has to.”
Henderson believes there can still be honest and fair elections. The question for her is whether the losing candidate will accept the results.
“We are seeing a trend of candidates who lose races now refusing to concede, saying it was rigged, saying it wasn’t fair, even when it isn’t close,” she said. “Candidates who lose can do so much good by graciously conceding. That will instill confidence in the public.”
“I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI”
In January, armed federal agents seized ballots from a local facility in Fulton County, Georgia.
“In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI,” 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 enabled 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. Then director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, watched as boxes of ballots were loaded onto trucks.
Barrett has no idea where the ballots are now. She believes the seizure was “political theater aimed at undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections.”
“I think it was all part of this concerted effort that’s happening nationwide to undermine faith in elections,” Barrett said.
Three months ago, the FBI temporarily reassigned 260 analysts to work on a “priority investigation” into the Georgia materials, according to an internal FBI email obtained by 60 Minutes. So far, nothing has come of the investigation. There have been dozens of probes into the 2020 election in Fulton County, but none have moved the needle.
“People see all of these investigations and FBI raids and subpoenas and they say, ‘Something must be wrong there. Why should I believe the results?'”
The Justice Department responds
Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, said the administration is aggressively pursuing new investigations and they are looking at “thousands” of possible cases of noncitizen voting.
“We’ve been in office for less than two years. We’ve had investigations ongoing for over a year and it takes time,” Dhillon said.
Dhillon said there have been irregularities during prior elections, and that a record number of election observers and monitors – more than 1,000 of them – would be at the polls during midterms as a way to increase voter confidence.
Recent surveys show that only about half of Americans expect the midterms to be free and fair.
Dhillon called concerns that Mr. Trump might challenge midterm results “paranoia.” If a noncitizen votes, that individual vote would be challenged, she said, not the entire election.
“I don’t know what is going to happen,” Dhillon told 60 Minutes, “but I can tell you that absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states.”
