Trump Admin Threatens Election Officials With Prison for Not Suppressing Votes

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin is threatening election officials who refuse to help the Trump administration suppress votes with fines or imprisonment.

Of course, that’s not how he put it. However, that is essentially what Mullin’s comments, coupled with a letter that Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, amount to.

A day after Donald Trump claimed that DHS had identified more than 250,000 noncitizens who were registered to vote in four states – California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey – Mullin stated that election officials there and across the country who will not assist the administration in purging these voters from their rolls face serious penalties.

“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,” he said on Friday.

This comes on the heels of Dhillon’s letters earlier this month, which warned election officials that they could be prosecuted for “aiding and abetting” fraudulent voters.

Here are a couple of things to note: First of all, if the administration has information that noncitizens, or anybody else, voted illegally, then it should be indicting them since that would be a felony.

The fact that nobody has been charged serves as a major red flag with regard to the reliability of the figure Trump cited (and Mullin repeated in letters to the top election officials of those four states).

In reality, like most of the president’s claims on this issue, that figure is more than likely completely bogus.

Every credible audit and investigation into whether noncitizens are casting ballots or even registering to vote, including those conducted in Republican-led states and by the conservative Heritage Foundation, have shown that this is a problem that virtually doesn’t exist.

And that brings us to the second point: Mullin suggested that the administration arrived at this figure by using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) tool of DHS’s US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

However, that system is notoriously flawed and produces a lot of false positives, especially with regard to recently naturalized citizens.

Which brings us to the point of all of this: It is not in the interest of Republicans to let these Americans vote.

Here is why: While more than two-thirds of the people born in the US are white, the overwhelming majority of naturalized citizens, who make up 10 percent of the population, are part of a minority.

Since whites are the only racial/ethnic group that solidly favors the GOP, it makes sense that the Trump administration, under the guise of “cleaning up voter rolls,” would want to suppress the votes of recently naturalized Americans.

And if it takes threatening election officials with imprisonment to help them in that endeavor, then that’s apparently a step they are willing to take.