Election officials describe federal government's actions around the voting system | 60 Minutes
In a Nutshell
Federal officials are using raids, lawsuits, and threats of prosecution to pressure state election officials over non-citizen voting and ballot access, despite audits showing such fraud is extremely rare. Trump and the Justice Department are aggressively investigating voter rolls and election materials across multiple states, while the president has publicly called for nationalizing voting in key areas. Only half of Americans now expect the upcoming midterms to be free and fair, as these federal actions erode trust in the decentralized election system.
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The midterms are two weeks away with President Trump using his power to intimidate people who run elections, putting the voting system under remarkable stress. The latest move came on Friday when the Justice Department threatened to prosecute California election officials if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from 20,000 people the Trump administration says are likely non-citizens.
This is the latest in a sequence of actions that has bred an erosion of faith in the integrity of elections. The story focuses on how state and local election officials are being pressured in a way that is stoking that distrust.
In Georgia this past January, armed federal agents seized ballots from a local election facility. Fulton County Commissioner, Democrat Dana Barrett, got a text message that sent her racing to a warehouse near Atlanta.
"They had vests, they had guns, they had all of the equipment on their belts as if they were raiding a drug house."
Dozens of agents gained entry with a criminal search warrant that allowed them to seize ballots and other election materials from the 2020 election. Barrett stated there was no way to refuse since they had a valid warrant signed by a judge.
The agents worked all day packing up more than 600 boxes of election records. After nightfall and after director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard arrived, the boxes were loaded onto trucks and disappeared.
Barrett stated they have no idea where the ballots are now and described it as "political theater aimed at undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections."
Barrett believes the Georgia raid was part of a "concerted effort that's happening nationwide to undermine faith in elections." An internal FBI email was obtained temporarily reassigning 260 analysts to work on a priority investigation into the Georgia materials. Three months later, nothing has come of it.
There have been dozens of probes into the 2020 election in Georgia and none have moved the needle. The pattern involves taking a fraudulent claim, investigating it at the state level, then the federal level refers to what the state did, and people see all of these investigations and FBI raids and subpoenas and conclude something must be wrong.
The Trump administration has cast more doubt about the reliability of elections by investigating voting machines and actual ballots, which the Justice Department has attempted in several states.
Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican in a deeply red state where President Trump won the last election by more than 20 points, stated this is interference she's never seen before. In the past two elections she oversaw, threats were all external from non-state actors and cybersecurity threats, but now there are threats coming from within the federal government.
Henderson is responsible for Utah's elections from voter registration to counting ballots on election day. Last year, the Justice Department zeroed in on Henderson and her counterparts in states across the country, demanding their statewide voter registration list including voters' confidential personal information.
Henderson refused, stating: "They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private. Social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver's license numbers." She was not given good answers about why they wanted the data and was concerned about what they would do with it.
Officials in 29 other states, both Democrat and Republican, refused to comply. The Justice Department has sued all of them, saying it needs access to voter rolls to help ensure immigrants who are not entitled to vote don't.
State audits have shown that non-citizen voting is extremely rare. In Utah, Henderson found only 52 questionable cases out of more than 2 million voters, which calculates to 2,000 of 1%.
Henderson has been notified that if she knowingly allows any non-citizens to vote in Utah, she could be prosecuted and even sent to prison. Election security is described as national security.
In July, Secretary of Homeland Security Mark Wayne Mullen stated those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, penalties, and depending on how far it goes, prison time.
Election officials in California have been put on notice. The Justice Department has threatened to prosecute them for essentially the same crime. President Trump put out a social media post about California stating they will all go to jail for a long period of time.
Henderson stated she is under official investigation by the Justice Department. She maintains she is just doing her job and states: "I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are if as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right."
Other Republicans like Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming pushed back when election monitors from the Justice Department in August demanded access to his voting machines.
"I feel very strongly about federal government coming in and taking our guns. I don't like that. And I don't like the federal government coming in and taking our votes either."
President Trump defied history and the Constitution with a statement on a podcast stating Republicans should take over the voting and nationalize the voting in at least 15 places.
In America, elections are local, run by towns, counties, and states, as specified in Article 1 of the Constitution. Congress makes laws regulating elections, but the president doesn't have a role in running them.
That hasn't stopped President Trump from signing two executive orders trying to create new federal voting rules. One executive order addresses non-citizens not being able to vote in federal elections.
Harmy Dylan, head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, has spearheaded the government's voter roll initiative. She stated the point is not to sow distrust, claiming the distrust is already there and these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time really in volume.
Dylan noted that even the Biden administration prosecuted 13 people for non-citizen voting. She stated there are literally thousands of investigations ongoing and that it takes time.
The pile up of investigations and charges of voting irregularities have caused voters to lose faith in the election system. In the 21 months of President Trump's second term, he has said the vote can't be trusted more than 150 times.
At the Republican midterm convention last month, President Trump asked his supporters to make a promise to go out with family and friends and cheat like hell like they do.
One argument is that when the president keeps saying the system is rigged, people lose confidence. Dylan stated she thinks there were irregularities in prior elections but people are more sensitive to it now.
Dylan dismissed concerns about ICE agents being sent to polling places and called the notion that President Trump might challenge the results of the midterms paranoia. She stated that non-citizen voting would lead to that person's vote being challenged but not the entire election.
When asked if she could rule out a state vote being challenged, she stated she doesn't know what's going to happen but absence some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states.
With 16 days until the election, polls show that only half of Americans expect the midterms to be free and fair. In swing states where elections are razor thin close, the question is whether they can have honest and fair elections.
Dylan stated they can have honest and fair elections, but whether or not the losing candidates accept those results is the question. There is a trend of candidates who lose races refusing to concede, saying it was rigged even when it isn't close.
Candidates who lose can do much good by graciously conceding, which will instill confidence in the public.
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