Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told states on Friday they must meet five new federal election security requirements, or forfeit access to DHS grant money. The warning, delivered hours after President Trump addressed the nation on election integrity, marks the administration's most aggressive move yet to force states into cleaning up voter rolls and securing voting systems ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Mullin, a former senator, did not frame the mandate as optional. As the New York Post reported, he laid out the stakes in blunt terms:
"We are going to make our security enhancements mandatory, meaning that if these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to work or to run federal elections, they're going to have to implement security issues."
The five requirements include using the USCIS-operated SAVE database to verify the citizenship status of voters and poll workers, conducting manual audits of at least 5 percent of ballots after every federal election, matching ballot counts to voter counts, and moving away from barcode-based ballot systems. States must begin using the SAVE system within 120 days of accepting their grant award.
The price of refusal: up to $1 billion in federal grant funding is on the line. The Washington Examiner reported that non-compliant states will have 20 percent of their DHS grant funding withheld, money tied to FEMA's Homeland Security Grant Program, which is ordinarily used for counterterrorism purposes.
DHS sent warning letters to California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, alleging that each state has thousands of non-citizens on its voter rolls. The numbers DHS cited are significant: 190,832 in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.
The administration has already begun flagging hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls across cooperating states. Just The News reported that Mullin confirmed a new department within DHS is being established to review each case individually.
"We are now going to that record. We're setting up a department in DHS... We are going through these files one by one."
Twenty-three states are already participating in DHS's expanded SAVE program. But several states, including some led by Republicans, such as Mississippi, North Dakota, and West Virginia, have not joined, as Fox News reported. Mullin did not spare them from scrutiny.
"Every state that's not participating with us should be asked the hard question why not? What are you afraid of?"
Mullin went further than threatening grant dollars. He warned that individual election officials who refuse to act on the information DHS provides could face fines, penalties, and criminal prosecution.
"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 also announced that DHS will scrub election records both before and after the midterms, searching for illegal immigrants, deceased voters, and other ineligible registrants. Breitbart reported Mullin's warning to anyone who might try to vote illegally:
"If you're illegal and attempted to vote, or you tried to vote illegally for someone else, we will find you, and we will charge you."
DHS's cybersecurity agency will also release an updated election infrastructure plan within 30 days, along with guidance to help states secure voting machines. The administration has conditioned future election grants on states making required fixes.
The DHS announcement followed Trump's Thursday night address to the nation, in which he claimed China interfered in the 2020 election and that foreign adversaries possessed the voter files of 220 million Americans.
"Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue."
The White House simultaneously released a tranche of intelligence documents on its website, including presidential daily brief materials and related emails from the first Trump term. The documents acknowledged that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all have the capability to access and potentially manipulate data in U.S. election-related computer systems, though they noted: "We do not know whether they have specific plans to interfere with the functioning of these systems."
One passage assessed that Beijing had taken "some low-level, exploratory steps to denigrate the President and shape voter perceptions ahead of the election." But the documents also noted that intelligence officials didn't see Beijing trying to influence the presidential outcome in favor of one candidate over another, and that China assessed the risk of interference "outweighs any potential gains."
Perhaps most striking was an internal email from the document tranche: "We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election." The article's authors noted it remains unclear why the intelligence agency chose to leave out election-related analysis during Trump's first term. Senders' names in the email chain are redacted, and much of the information in the emails is blacked out.
The Washington Times reported that the White House also released a declassified U.S. intelligence analysis showing Venezuela's former Maduro regime sought to develop the capability to manipulate vote counts on U.S. voting machines. Mullin stated flatly: "We know that they can change voter registration and your vote. We know it's possible. It's not a question. It's not even for debate."
What remains an open question, one the White House did not directly address, is whether any illegal votes were actually cast or changed in the 2020 election. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the Post: "There is nothing more sacred to our democracy than ensuring free, fair, and secure elections, and this administration is taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so it can never be bought, hacked, or stolen again."
The response from Democratic governors was swift and predictable. California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on social media: "California law is clear: You MUST be a U.S. citizen to vote state and federal election. Voter fraud is EXTREMELY RARE, and almost always committed by U.S. citizens."
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told MSNBC's Morning Joe that if the administration has "information, share it with us and let's work together to address it. I think, at the end of the day, all they have is a bunch of conspiracy theories."
The Pennsylvania Secretary of State's office issued a statement noting that voters "must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place." That statement, however, does not address the question of whether non-citizens ended up on the rolls in the first place, which is precisely the gap the administration says it is trying to close.
The pattern from these governors is familiar. When the federal government presents data showing a problem, the response is not to investigate the data but to dismiss the premise. DHS says it has identified nearly 191,000 potential non-citizen registrations in California alone. Newsom's answer is that voter fraud is "EXTREMELY RARE." Those two claims are not necessarily in conflict, but Newsom's framing sidesteps the question of how non-citizens ended up registered at all.
That question matters. Noncitizens have already been charged with voting illegally in federal elections in New Jersey, one of the four states DHS flagged in its letters.
The administration's executive action is partly a workaround for a legislative impasse. Trump has called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and mandate photo ID to cast a ballot. The House passed the bill. The Senate has not.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said he does not have the 60 votes needed to move the legislation. Mullin acknowledged the math problem while expressing frustration with the delay.
"John is a good friend of mine. I think the Save Act should be passed tomorrow. I think it should have already been passed. There's no excuse for it not being passed. However, he has a vote problem."
Some of that resistance comes from within Republican ranks. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina spoke on the Senate floor Wednesday, arguing that states do not have enough time to implement the act's requirements before November's midterm election. He warned he would use procedural tools to slow the bill's progress.
"I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government until people cop a clue and do the math."
Tillis added: "What we're going to do if we continue down this path is to convince the American people that you can't count on your election results. And that is dangerous. That is irresponsible."
Tillis's objection is practical, not philosophical, he's not disputing the need for election security but questioning whether the timeline is realistic. That's a fair concern. But it also hands Democrats a talking point and gives cover to senators who may simply prefer not to take the vote. The administration, unable to wait for Congress, has chosen to use the tools it has: grant conditions, enforcement warnings, and the bully pulpit.
Trump has declared he will not sign additional legislation until Congress passes the SAVE America Act. That kind of pressure has worked before, the Senate handed Trump a win on Iran war powers after intense White House lobbying, but the dynamics on election law are different. The bill also includes provisions to ban most mail voting, bar transgender women and girls from competing in women's and girls' sports, and restrict transgender medical treatments for minors. Those add-ons complicate the vote count further.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, dismissed Trump's claims outright. "Why didn't they find any of these so-called allegations?" he asked, pointing out that Trump's own appointees ran the intelligence agencies during the period in question.
The administration's approach amounts to a bet: that tying federal dollars to election security compliance will force even reluctant states to act, regardless of what happens in the Senate. It is an aggressive use of executive leverage, conditioning counterterrorism grants on voter roll hygiene, and it will face legal and political challenges.
But the underlying question is straightforward. If DHS has identified a quarter-million potential non-citizen registrations across just four states, and 23 states are cooperating while others refuse, the public deserves to know why holdout states won't verify their rolls. The answer "voter fraud is rare" does not explain how non-citizens got registered. The answer "share your information" does not explain why a state would resist using a federal verification database designed for exactly this purpose.
The House has already moved on major enforcement legislation this term. The question now is whether the Senate, and the states, will match that urgency on the integrity of the ballot box.
Americans don't ask for much from their elections. They ask to know that every legal vote counts and every illegal one doesn't. Any governor or senator who treats that expectation as a conspiracy theory has already answered the question of whose side they're on.