Boston (CNN) — Four days after President Donald Trump declared that his administration uncovered “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” dozens of state election officials from across the country gathered in Boston.
But they weren’t there for an emergency summit to tackle the supposed crisis, even though the midterm elections are only 15 weeks away.
Instead, these election officials from 37 states met for a long-scheduled professional conference that struck a strikingly business-as-usual tone. In fact, Trump and his primetime address hardly came up.
In interviews with CNN, more than a dozen election officials from both parties said Trump’s address surfaced little new in terms of evidence. Several GOP officials even scoffed at his presentation, pointing to the data that the administration released to try to bolster its case that there are massive numbers of non-citizens voting in US elections.
Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues was filled with “a lot of laughing emojis, and like, ‘you got to be kidding me?’ that this was all it was.”
A GOP official from a state Trump won three times also panned the speech, which included the declassification of intelligence reports that Trump said posed an “unprecedented election security nightmare” with threats from China and Venezuela. (Trump didn’t mention that the reports also made clear that neither country ever tampered with US election results.)
“I read the documents,” the official told CNN on the condition that his state not be identified. “It was old. I’ve already seen this stuff. It wasn’t new to me. We already had most of this information.”
Democratic officials and election experts have condemned Trump for, in their view, escalating his longstanding attacks on the voting process, accusing him of laying groundwork to explain away any potential GOP losses this November.
Many Republicans who run elections have been far more circumspect in their public comments – broadly expressing support for Trump’s stated goal of cleaning up voter rolls and preventing illegal voting, while defending their record in their states.
But in private, many decry what Trump is doing.
“We all know elections aren’t rigged, but we have to keep our heads down and do our jobs,” one Republican election official told CNN, on condition of anonymity, because they didn’t want to anger the Trump administration.
Pushing back on Trump’s data
The president’s speech last Thursday, and a follow-up presentation from the Department of Homeland Security, singled out several states that supposedly had staggeringly high numbers of non-citizens on the voter rolls.
Trump has long peddled false and fantastical claims that thousands and perhaps even millions of undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections. Isolated cases do exist, but comprehensive studies from right-wing and left-leaning think tanks have concluded that this occurs on a tiny scale.
Still, the administration said it had reviewed public data and uncovered hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on the rolls in Pennsylvania and Nevada, and in California and New Jersey, which are Democratic strongholds. Some officials in those states have called for more transparency, demanding to know how DHS arrived at those numbers.
Even some red states that voluntarily turned over their voter lists to the Trump administration for examination were swept into the president’s latest push. The administration said more than 28,000 non-citizens had been found on rolls in states with GOP election officials.
The DHS citizenship database being used to review voter rolls – called SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – has a record of overstating the number of registered non-citizens. DHS itself acknowledges that states using the system voluntarily for voter-roll maintenance must further investigate any matches.
Sam Hayes, the GOP executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections who has aggressively backed several of Trump’s election policies, said his team wouldn’t rubber-stamp the administration’s findings. He said the state, which DHS claimed had 1,599 non-citizens on its rolls, would conduct its own verification, which takes time and requires contacting registrants.
“There’s nothing we accept at face value and just start removing folks” from the voter rolls, Hayes told CNN. “We’ve got to make our own independent assessment of this. … We still have to do the due diligence on our end.”
Hayes also threw cold water on Trump’s desire for quick answers, saying: “It’s going to be tough to get it done by the midterms, but we’re working toward that goal.”
Georgia election officials told CNN the administration’s claims about non-citizens on their rolls appear inflated. Of the 2,549 registrants flagged by DHS, they said, only about 20 had ever cast a ballot in the state.
Despite questioning the White House data, officials from both parties stressed that they take seriously their duty to keep non-citizens off the rolls.
New Jersey’s governor announced Tuesday that a software error at the state Motor Vehicle Commission accidentally added about 6,600 non-citizens to the voter rolls, and that 400 cast improper ballots in recent elections.
The surprising revelation from a Democratic governor in a liberal stronghold immediately made waves and drew “told-you-so” recriminations from the Trump administration.
Brushing off Mullin’s threats
At a follow-up press conference Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened fines and even potential “prison time” for election officials who don’t comply with the Trump administration’s demands for voter rolls and other election overhauls.
Election officials told CNN they take these threats seriously, especially after seeing the Trump-era Justice Department indict several of his political opponents. But at the same time, officials said, their focus is on their work.
“There is the concern about, ‘Could I be made the example of?’” said Crane, the Republican who runs Colorado’s bipartisan election clerks’ association. “But I think, by and large, it’s become somewhat white noise at this point.”
A Democratic election administrator from a battleground state told CNN, on condition of anonymity, that he got a concerned call from his mother after she heard Mullin’s comments about possibly prosecuting election officials.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department sent similar warning letters to all 50 states. Idaho’s Republican attorney general was among those who pushed back, rebuking the DOJ in a sharply worded reply letter that said the “insinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken.”
“Stop threatening your friends in Idaho,” wrote James Craig, a top lawyer from the Idaho attorney general’s office.
A GOP election official from another state told CNN that even some officials in red states don’t feel safe, because of the Trump administration’s unpredictability.
“It’s extremely concerning when they talk like that, and we have no idea what they’re going to do,” the official said.
The-CNN-Wire
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