Utah's GOP Lieutenant Governor Says Threats to Elections Now Come From Washington

With the midterm elections two weeks away, election officials in both parties say the federal government's pressure on the voting system is breeding distrust, according to a 60 Minutes report that aired Sunday. Federal agents have seized ballots, voting machines have been examined, and the Justice Department is locked in court fights with states across the country over information about individual voters.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in a deeply red state, told the program she has never seen anything like it. "In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things," she said. "But now we also have threats coming from within our own government." Last month, she said, the Justice Department told her in writing that she is under investigation.

The dispute began last year, when the Justice Department asked nearly every state for its full voter rolls, including confidential data. "They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver's license numbers," Henderson said. She was not given good answers about why the data was needed and refused to hand it over. Officials in 29 other states, Democratic and Republican, have also refused, and the Justice Department has sued all of them. The administration says access to the rolls will help purge immigrants who are not entitled to vote, and it has alleged, without providing evidence, that 278,000 noncitizens are registered. Henderson said she found 52 questionable voters among more than 2 million registered in Utah.

The latest move came Thursday, when the Justice Department sued California, claiming the state mailed ballots to more than 20,000 likely noncitizens and threatening to prosecute officials who knowingly count them. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the federal government gave no detail about how it identified those people and questioned the accuracy of its data. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told 60 Minutes: "Noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections. So the question is simply how many of them there are." Noncitizen voting does happen but is extremely rare. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said this summer that a software glitch mistakenly registered thousands of noncitizens in her state, and about 340 of them actually voted. The Justice Department has charged more than 100 noncitizens with voting illegally since the start of Mr. Trump's second term.

In January, armed federal agents seized ballots and other 2020 election materials from a local facility in Fulton County, Georgia, packing up more than 600 boxes of records while then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard watched. Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, a Democrat, said she has no idea where the ballots are now and called the seizure "political theater aimed at undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections." Three months ago the FBI temporarily reassigned 260 analysts to a "priority investigation" of the Georgia materials, according to an internal email obtained by 60 Minutes. Nothing has come of it so far, as with dozens of earlier probes into the 2020 election in Fulton County.

Dhillon said the administration is pursuing "thousands" of possible cases of noncitizen voting and that a record number of observers, more than 1,000, will monitor the polls. She called concerns that Mr. Trump might challenge the midterm results "paranoia." Mr. Trump has signed two executive orders on voting in his second term, one requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register and another on mail-in ballots, though the Constitution gives the president no role in running elections. Recent surveys show only about half of Americans expect the midterms to be free and fair.

Henderson said she believes honest elections are still possible, and that the larger question is whether losing candidates will accept the result. "We are seeing a trend of candidates who lose races now refusing to concede, saying it was rigged, saying it wasn't fair, even when it isn't close," she said. As for the investigation into her own office, she added: "I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right. Someone has to."