Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued a series of directives regarding election security on Friday, warning that foreign adversaries possess the capability to hack voter machines and vowing to apply “maximum pressure” to identify illegally cast votes.
Mullin’s statements expanded upon remarks made by President Trump during a primetime address on Thursday, in which the president characterized voting machines as “vulnerable and they’re easily compromised.”
Mullin went further by raising the specific prospect of hackers accessing systems to manually alter vote counts. To date, the U.S. intelligence community maintains that no foreign adversary has ever successfully altered vote tallies in a U.S. election.
During the Friday briefing, Mullin stated that state election officials would face consequences if they declined to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) upcoming initiatives. The department’s directives aim to gain access to state vote tabulators and voter registration rolls. Federal efforts to access these systems have previously been rejected by various courts.
“We’re not trying to get into anything else, but we’re saying that the machines had to be secured and that your voter restoration list needs to be scrubbed,” Mullin told reporters.
The secretary emphasized that participation from state authorities would not be entirely optional without federal scrutiny.
“I will tell you if the states choose not to participate – we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states and hold then the election officials accountable,” Mullin said.
Under the U.S. Constitution, state governments have primary authority to administer elections, creating a potential legal conflict between the federal government and state election administrators over access to local voting infrastructure.
READ: DHS Finds Over 250,000 Non-Citizen Voter Registrations Across Four States
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