Trump’s Attempts to Interfere in the Midterms Have Been “Complete Failures”

Immigration officers don’t normally focus on elections, but lately they’ve been showing up at houses, armed and in uniform, to see if people are illegally registered to vote.

They’ve been doing this in multiple states, including California, where the feds arrested 28 green card holders as part of “Operation Protect the Vote.” The administration is also trying to stop officials in California and Los Angeles County from counting 20,000 mail-in ballots that the administration claims could be coming from noncitizens.

“Federal law is very clear: It is a felony to order troops or armed men, civilian or military, anywhere near a voting location.”

All of this is unprecedented, and it’s not happening without a fight. Advocacy groups say the administration is using unreliable data, and that it’s so-called voter protection operation is just a ploy to scare people, including citizens who are lawfully registered. “It’s a textbook case of voter intimidation,” says Beau Tremitiere, an attorney at the Protect Democracy Project who sued the administration along with co-counsel at the National Immigration Law Center and San Francisco and Santa Clara counties. (It’s one of multiple similar lawsuits nationally.)

Last week, a federal court in that case blocked Homeland Security from its door-knocking until after Election Day, arguing that it likely violated the Voting Rights Act. But could ICE still show up at the polls? And how credible is the government’s data? Are those 20,000 ballots really from noncitizens?

I turned to elections expert David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who now leads the “fiercely nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research, and who’s been following the news closely. “For the first time in American history,” he told me, the feds have become “an adversary to state and local election officials, rather than a partner and a collaborator.”

The good news? So far, they’re failing miserably.

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

How important is the latest ruling on door-knocking?

Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of ICE, should not be knocking on the doors of individuals it suspects, often wrongly, are noncitizens who may be registered to vote.

The federal government has a general policy about not doing things in close proximity before an election, because it could interfere. That’s particularly true for the Department of Justice—they are not to undertake investigations, question individuals, or file charges in close proximity to an election. This administration is not only ignoring those prohibitions; they’re actively ramping up as we get closer to an election, perhaps out of desperation.

If they had any possible legal justification to knock on doors, that should have been done months ago, not weeks before an election. Once that happens, it runs the risk of seeming to be an intentional interference.

Beyond door-knocking, what could DHS do to interfere with the midterms?

There’s virtually nothing they could easily do.

One thing that’s getting lost in all this—in the concerns about federal interference—is how much of a failure they all are. The entire federal government has been weaponized to manufacture anything that could support President Trump’s false claims about voter fraud and voter theft. Over 21 months, after mobilizing Homeland Security and the Department of Justice and the FBI and the intelligence community, they failed. Their two executive orders have been blocked by multiple courts, including the Supreme Court. They are zero for 27 in their lawsuits trying to seize sensitive voter data, and nine of those courts have Trump-appointed judges! They can’t get any legislation through a Congress that their own party controls.

The 28 people arrested by the feds make up “0.0001 percent of the California voter registration list of over 23 million voters.”

Their investigations of past elections have resulted in nothing, and so this is all a lot of noise, and it’s failing. I mean, it’s being blocked. The California [federal] court blocked that Homeland Security Investigations door-knocking. The Missouri redistricting shenanigans were shut down by the Supreme Court. The executive order on mail voting was blocked by the Supreme Court. A federal judge ruled against the frivolous California ballots lawsuit. [See end note.] And the Alaska courts are going to strike down the even more frivolous lawsuit seeking to preemptively stop a state from certifying an election under its own laws. So I don’t think we should lose the fact that, while it’s exhausting and it should not be normalized that the federal government is trying to do all these things, they are also complete failures.

And you’re skeptical that DHS would show up at the polls?

“Skeptical” is not the word. I’m virtually certain it will not. Look, federal law is very clear: It is a felony to order troops or armed men, civilian or military, anywhere near a voting location, punishable by up to five years in prison, a fine, and really importantly, disqualification from federal office. It will not happen. That has been a very effective statute over the years.

But there’s another reason it won’t happen. As you and I are talking, it’s eight days until voting closes. We are going to blow past 30 million people already having voted today, probably right now, while we’re talking.

In Texas, their record turnout for a midterm election is 8 million voters, and they have already had over 4 million vote. Over half of their record turnout has already turned out. If ICE was going to deploy, where are they? The horses are out of the barn. And the reality is, recently Election Day voting skews Republican and early and mail voting skews Democrat, so every minute we get closer to Election Day, the more likely it is that if they were foolish enough to deploy ICE, which would be blocked by a court immediately, they might be suppressing their own voters disproportionately.

Look, there are people within the administration, and perhaps even the president himself, who would like nothing more than for all of us to worry that ICE will be at the polls. That way, they won’t have to actually deploy them. They can get people to just stay home on their own. But it’s not working.

What do you know about the 28 people arrested in California. Are those arrests legitimate?

The idea that the Department of Justice would, days before an election, post videos and social media and stage SWAT-style arrests of grandmothers who’ve been in this country for decades, who may have allegedly either accidentally registered or possibly voted, in many cases decades ago, is ridiculous.

I can’t speak to the legitimacy. And by the way, the DOJ doesn’t have much information on the legitimacy, either. But these are also just arrests. They haven’t proved anything in a court of law yet. And what I can tell you is that 28 people is 0.0001 percent of the California voter registration list of over 23 million voters.

Has door-knocking been happening outside California, too?

The door-knocking was enjoined in nine states. But I have not heard of it being particularly widespread.

Why are they targeting these particular states?

I have no idea. The question that’s most interesting to me is not the why, but the when. You know, President Trump’s been making false claims about widespread noncitizen voting since before he took office. He had his handpicked cabinet. They’ve been in complete control of the federal government for 21 months. Why is anything happening right now? The administration told California that it had 190,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter list back in July.

That number is clearly made up, but the federal government didn’t share that list with California, didn’t explain how they came up with that number. California asked for that; they didn’t give it to them, and then they waited three months to file a lawsuit, long after mail ballots had already gone out, after federal law prohibited the state from conducting voter list maintenance.

The administration’s “loud political claims” of large numbers of noncitizens on state voting rolls “begin shrinking down to a very, very tiny number once it undergoes scrutiny.”

Let’s say, hypothetically, there was a federal government working in good faith that thought it had evidence that some people on voter lists in the states were not citizens. How would that government operate? Well, they would work cooperatively with the states. They’d send them the lists. They’d explain their methodology, so the states could say, “Oh no, you used this thing wrong,” or “This sounds credible. We’re going to investigate.” And they would have done it so far in advance of a federal general election, before federal law prohibits list maintenance, so the state could have reasonably reached out to people and said, “Hey, are you actually registered? Are you actually a noncitizen? Was this an accident? Was this an error?”

That doesn’t look anything like what we’re seeing. What we see here is a Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security that are essentially operating as a political propaganda arm of the president’s operation, rather than as a law enforcement arm representing the American people.

How reliable, or unreliable, is the federal data?

Because of a lack of transparency, we don’t know a lot about how they’re actually coming up with these names, and we’re getting a lot of sketchy, kind of changing stories. Sometimes they say they’re using commercial data, sometimes not. Sometimes there’s a third-party vendor. Sometimes they say there wasn’t a third-party vendor. Sometimes they say they paid for it. Sometimes they say they didn’t. They don’t really tell you how they matched data across different sources.

I’ve done a ton of work in my career on voter data, working with election officials, not in any kind of political way, and one of the hardest things to do is to take a record of David Becker from one data source and a record from David Becker from another data source and say with absolute certainty that’s the same human being. It’s really hard with David Becker. It’s probably really hard with Samantha Michaels. It is really, really hard with John Lee, or Sean O’Hara, or Maria Rodriguez. While you and I have been talking, there have been multiple Maria Rodriguez’s born in the same city, and that’s true across other names. It’s really hard to do well. Now, it’s not hard to do if you don’t care if you get a lot of false positives because you want to create a big number.

So the process is opaque. But what we do know is the outputs. We’ve been tracking all these claims, and we see the same trend over and over again: There are really loud political claims about a very large number of potential noncitizens that begin shrinking down to a very, very tiny number once it undergoes scrutiny.

In California, the federal government claimed 190,000 noncitizens were on the voter list. Then they sued three months later claiming 20,000, and then they arrested 28. Of those 20,000, only about 7,000 seem to have Los Angeles County addresses, and they took a sampling of 200 and started investigating: Over 35 percent of the ones with a listed birthplace had a US birthplace. That means the first layer of review indicated a significantly high error rate. By the way, almost half of them were not even active registered voters.

Another example is Nevada: The same press conference where Secretary Mullin claimed to have found 190,000 Californians who were noncitizens on the list, he claimed there were about 16,000 Nevadans on the list who were noncitizens, and Nevada did the same thing California did, and said, “Show us your work, give us the list, tell us your methodology.”

[The feds] would not share anything in writing, but they did meet with them privately, and they shared a list of 185 names, not 16,000. Then Nevada checked out all 185. Turns out, all of them were citizens.

Editor’s note: This interview took place on Monday, but a line about the outcome of the administration’s mail-in ballot lawsuit against California was updated with permission to reflect a ruling on Wednesday.