\n The administration\u2019s data-collection effort has run into major legal hurdles, with more than a dozen courts siding with states that have refused to provide their voter rolls to the federal government and a separate judge ruling that the DHS program that is central to the audits is illegal. Mullin railed against that ruling Friday while also threatening election officials with prosecutions for not participating in the DHS voter roll reviews.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIf the election officials \u2013 once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to \u2013 then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison,\u201d Mullin said.\n <\/p>\n
\n The Justice Department made a similar threat earlier this month in letters to all 50 states that were quickly dismissed by election officials, many of whom were gathered at a conference in South Dakota during Trump\u2019s speech.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI\u2019m not intimidated by that at all,\u201d New Hampshire\u2019s Republican Secretary of David Scanlan, whose state recently secured the dismissal of a DOJ lawsuit seeking the data, told CNN Thursday.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI see this is a temper tantrum disguised as an official letter because they have hit roadblocks,\u201d added Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat.\n <\/p>\n
\n Idaho\u2019s Republican attorney general\u2019s office responded with a sharp letter of its own, telling DOJ its \u201cinsinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n The citizenship data system that DHS is using to review the rolls \u2013 which is known as SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) \u2013 has a reputation for presenting an inflated picture of registered non-citizens. DHS explicitly requires states that use the program voluntarily for voter list maintenance do further investigations of its matches.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Mullin did not include any of that context in his remarks, nor did he describe the 250,000 number as potential non-citizens, as DHS did in its press release announcing the letters to the four states.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWe can affirm that on its face, we refute these claims,\u201d Nevada Democratic Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told CNN in a statement Friday. \u201cThese numbers are wildly speculative at best and the Department of Homeland Security hasn\u2019t shared anything that backs it up.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n The administration has not put out information about how many of those individuals it thinks actually voted, but Mullin said Friday DHS officials are investigating the matter.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cAll evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania,\u201d Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday night. \u201cWhile the Department has made clear that we cannot share Pennsylvanians\u2019 private, personal information, we welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Additionally, DHS is touting tallies of non-citizens that it says were found on the rolls of Republican-led states by using SAVE. However, even those statistics appear to be not fully verified.\n <\/p>\n
\n Election officials in Georgia and North Carolina said the DHS statistics represent individuals flagged as possible noncitizens \u2014 not confirmed noncitizens on the rolls \u2014 and the true number could prove far smaller after further review.\n <\/p>\n
\n In Georgia, officials said only about 120 of the 2,549 flagged individuals have ever voted in the state.\n <\/p>\n
\n And Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, told CNN earlier Thursday earlier Thursday that election officials in his state were still verifying the citizenship status of the 1,000-plus names flagged in the DHS review.\n <\/p>\n
\n CNN\u2019s Fredreka Schouten contributed to this report.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration is escalating its attacks on election officials in key battleground states, with Homeland Security Secretary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":769101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-769100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/769101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}