President Donald Trump shakes hands with newly sworn-in Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin during a ceremony in the Oval Office on March 24, 2026. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday threatened to prosecute election officials in states that “fail to participate in securing elections” ahead of the November midterms.
Election officials who fail to comply with administrative directives aimed at making voting machines more secure and sharing voter data with the federal government through the powerful Systematic Alien Eligibility Verification computer program will be subject to fines and even prison time, he said.
“If states that choose not to participate in the SAVE program and choose not to participate in securing elections, we will make sure that we prioritize those states to check who voted in their states and hold election officials accountable,” Mullin said during the news conference.
The Trump administration will require states to make security improvements to their voting machines and will withhold grants or refunds from any states that fail to do so, he added.
The mandate was necessary, he said, because foreign adversaries produce parts that are vital components of U.S. voting machines and can “change voter registration and your vote.”
“The machines need to be secured and the list of registered voters needs to be cleared,” he said, summing up the department’s message to state officials. “Our machines are vulnerable to attacks. There are steps you can take now to protect them.”
Earlier Friday, Mullin sent a letter to the secretaries of state of the four states the department investigated – Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania – to warn them about “tens of thousands of foreign nationals who illegally appear on individual states’ voter rolls.”
Leaders in these states immediately pushed back against Mullin and President Donald Trump’s claims.
It is unclear what authority Mullin would exploit to investigate the state’s election administration. The U.S. Constitution gives states the authority to hold elections.
However, it is clear that the Trump administration considers election security a top priority in the run-up to the midterms.
Mullin’s remarks followed President Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Thursday evening, in which he declared that U.S. election systems are vulnerable to foreign cyberattacks and that countries such as China and Iran have sought to influence the outcome of previous elections, including 2018 and 2020.
Voting without citizenship
Trump has long focused on foreigners voting, which is scarce.
On Friday, Mullin said the Department of Homeland Security checked voter rolls in several states and found that more than 250,000 foreigners were registered to vote.
Mullin said the federal government would make it a priority to “look at who voted in their states” and hold election officials accountable.
The federal government will review the records “one by one,” he told a news conference, and will pursue maximum charges against anyone who voted illegally, which includes a sentence of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
SAVE in court
The SAVE program allows local authorities to determine someone’s immigration status for purposes such as applying for government jobs, benefits and driver’s licenses.
The administration wants states to exploit this powerful computer system to check the citizenship of people on voter rolls, and is fighting in court to reinstate the program after a federal court ruled in June that the expansion was illegal.
Mullin blamed the interruption on “activist” judges who don’t want secure elections.
SAVE differs from the SAVE America Act, a bill that proposes to restrict voter access by adding requirements for registering and casting ballots, including photo ID, with the same acronym as SAVE. The bill is stuck in the U.S. Senate and does not include funding for election security infrastructure.
Democratic officials are crying
At Mullin’s letter With Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, which was shared with State Newsroom, Mullin shared the “results” of a preliminary review of Nevada voter registration data, which showed that as many as 15,903 non-citizens were registered to vote.
“I hope you share the commitment to ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in our federal elections,” Mullin wrote. “Allowing only one foreigner to vote invalidates the vote of one U.S. citizen.”
Mullin said his team will lend a hand the state “take steps to protect Nevada voters and ensure that ineligible voters do not impact the upcoming federal election.”
Aguilar, a Democrat, told States Newsroom in a statement Friday that the department’s estimate is “wildly speculative at best.” The department “hasn’t released anything to confirm this,” he added.
Aguilar said there are many safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens or other ineligible voters from casting a ballot, and that Nevada hosts “one of the safest, most secure and accessible elections in the country.”
“The administration has no fundamental understanding of how elections work,” Aguilar wrote. “They just want to create chaos and doubt before the midterms.”
In a statement Friday afternoon, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt, a Republican, said all evidence shows that noncitizen voting is “extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”
He added that every resident must take multiple steps to verify their identity before casting a ballot or registering to vote.
“While the Department has clarified that we cannot share the private personal information of Pennsylvanians, we will review any information provided by DHS so that we can evaluate the validity of these claims,” Schmidt said.
California under fire
California has repeatedly come under fire from Trump over its elections. In his speech on Thursday eveningquestioned the fairness of the state’s recent Los Angeles mayoral and gubernatorial races.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber called the claims false and baseless.
“Non-citizen voting is still extremely rare,” she said. “In California, election officials work every day to maintain accurate voter rolls and ensure that only eligible voters are registered.”
She said her team will carefully review Mullin’s letter to evaluate the methodology of his claims and “welcome reasonable best practices that are consistent with state and federal law while protecting Californians’ personal information.”
“However, the information provided during the president’s speeches and on the White House website does not inspire confidence in the methodology used or the conclusions reached,” she added. “If the President truly cares about election integrity, he must stop undermining trust in our democracy, making it harder for eligible Americans to vote, and trying to seize power the Constitution expressly reserves to the states.”
