Question of Noncitizen Voting & NJ Assault Rifle Ban Struck Down

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1:42This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio.

1:48Alex Ebert:About 6 ,600 non-citizens were improperly registered to vote in New Jersey in 2023 and 2024, and up to 400 of them went on to improperly cast ballots. Governor Mickey Sherrill blamed a software error in the Motor Vehicle Commission system that registered people to vote even though they had indicated they were non-citizens when obtaining driver's licenses and identification cards. This entire situation is unacceptable. It's unacceptable that the vendor released software with such a glaring error. It's unacceptable that the MVC took a year to get this issue fixed. And it's unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability, or took action when it happened years ago.

2:42Alex Ebert:The state is removing ineligible voters from the rolls and replacing the vendor that oversees the system. But this revelation comes less than a week after President Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen claim that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are on voter rolls across the country. In just four states, we've identified 250 ,000 non-citizens registered to vote in California and Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada. My guest is Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center. Jonathan, explain what happened in New Jersey.

3:29So it appears that there was some sort of technological error in New Jersey's DMV system, where about 6 ,000 or so individuals who correctly identified themselves as non-citizens, you know, they weren't trying to register to vote, nevertheless were erroneously registered. New Jersey's election officials and governor made this announcement. They identified this problem. They've directed officials to remove them from the rolls. They are fixing the glitch in their driver's license system that caused this problem. And this is, I think, an example of how the system is supposed to work. The state and local officials who are responsible for overseeing voter registration identified a problem, made it clear to the public, and announced steps to mitigate the problem.

4:17You know, they don't need the federal government to step in and do it for them.

4:21Alex Ebert:The governor said that fewer than 400 of these non-citizens cast ballots. So that means that hundreds of non-citizens did cast ballots improperly in the New Jersey elections. Well, I think it's important to remember that more than 4.1 million ballots were cast in New Jersey in 2024. So that number, even if it was 400 in total, that's less than 1 % of 1%. It's 0.009 % of the total votes cast in New Jersey in 2024, which is nowhere near affecting the outcome of any federal election that took place in New Jersey in that year. Will this give ammunition to the Trump administration in its quest to show that there are non-citizens on voter rolls and non-citizens are voting?

5:14You know, it shouldn't because there's nothing in any of the proposals that the federal government has put forward that would have addressed this scenario. This was a simple case of human error, of technological error. Somebody misprogrammed the system. And so, you know, requiring, as the Trump administration wants, requiring voters to provide additional proof of citizenship to show a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote wouldn't have stopped this because these people said that they were not citizens. They weren't trying to register to vote. But, you know, elections are run by people.

5:48Sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes there is a glitch in the system. And, you know, that's why we have safeguards built in to ensure that it can be caught and fixed for the next time. And even in a scenario like this, where there was a technological problem that did result in some people being erroneously registered, it's not happening anywhere near in the numbers on the scale that the president and the White House are suggesting that it is. You know, this is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the votes, so small that it doesn't affect the outcome. And so, you know, in my view, this technological error, which is really all that it is, does not justify the kind of draconian restrictions that the Trump administration is proposing for voter registration, because those things, A, wouldn't have solved this problem, and be would have prevented many more people than this who are eligible from actually registering and voting.

6:47Alex Ebert:Mark Wayne Mullen, DHS secretary, said that in New Jersey, reviews found 35 ,152 non-citizens registered. The governor said that we've asked them for any evidence of this, where they got that number, who this is. We've received nothing back yet. I don't know where DHS's numbers came from, nor does New Jersey. You know, the announcement from New Jersey's governor today seems to me to be completely unrelated from what DOJ sent them. This was their own investigation into their own system, which every state is doing all the time. And I think that's the key takeaway here, is that state governments, who are the ones legally responsible for running our elections, are constantly going through their voter registration rules and their election systems to fix errors and to make sure that they are as accurate as is humanly possible.

7:43And what they don't need is wild accusations from the federal government based on no evidence that they're doing it wrong. You know, I think this incident in New Jersey shows that states are more than capable of maintaining clean voter rolls and addressing the problems as they arise. Because, you know, we have a very complicated election system and it's totally decentralized. It's run by states and in most important ways by counties and municipalities. You know, one of the things that makes it so resilient is that we don't have, you know, a single national election infrastructure that could be compromised or, you know, have some problem with it that would affect everybody.

8:24You know, every state runs its election slightly differently. So that's a lot of different structures and different systems where there could be a technological issue or a data entry problem or just a human mistake. But that's why state officials like, you know, the governor and in many places, the secretary of state or the attorney general have oversight authority and are looking into things like this and, you know, being transparent about, you know, where the system falls short and what they're doing to fix it.

8:49Alex Ebert:So the same software is going to be used for the midterms because they can't switch it over fast enough. So that leads me to believe that if there is a result in New Jersey that the Trump administration doesn't like, that they'll use this to try to attack the result. I'm sure that no matter what New Jersey officials say or do, that the Trump administration is going to point to this incident and claim that New Jersey's results can't be trusted. But that's why New Jersey, like every state, has audits and recounts and hand-marked paper ballots that can be checked after the fact. And that's why they're making this announcement now and removing these ineligible individuals from the rolls so that this can't happen again in November.

9:37But regardless of what New Jersey does, I expect the White House to use this as ammunition, not just in any claims that they make about the results in November, but also in their push to pass the Save America Act and to enable federal agencies to have a bigger role or take control of certain election administration functions, despite their lack of legal authority to do that.

10:00Alex Ebert:I mean, it doesn't seem likely that DHS got the numbers out of thin air. Might some of them be reliable? If you look at the numbers, Secretary Mullen, you know, released last week on Friday, and you compare not just these New Jersey numbers, but, you know, DHS and the White House released data about a number of states who have voluntarily shared their data with the federal government. And the White House and DHS's numbers for states like Texas and Louisiana are incredibly inflated compared to what those states themselves are reporting. And even Texas reported lower numbers than the White House did about suspected noncitizens on their rolls and then had to backtrack because they had wrongfully identified naturalized citizens as being ineligible.

10:48So whenever a federal or state agency makes inflated claims about huge numbers in the tens of thousands of ineligible registrants, I think we have to look at those with some skepticism because almost inevitably they get walked back. And especially in the case of DHS, there's just nothing that they have given us in terms of where they got their data, what methodology they used. We don't know where those numbers came from. They could have pulled them out of a hat. So if we're going to take those numbers seriously, I think we need a lot more information from DHS about how they came up with them.

11:26Alex Ebert:Coming up next, more about the threats against election officials and the Department of Justice is 0-16 in its attempts to get unredacted data rolls. This is Bloomberg. Support for the show comes from Public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On Public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English, like if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index.

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12:48Alex Ebert:Get the news you need in just 15 minutes. Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the podcast with a global view on the stories that matter. I'm Nathan Hager. And I'm Karen Moscow. Join us each morning for curated stories on current events, politics, business and foreign relations. Plus one conversation on the day's biggest developments, all in just 15 minutes. Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for a precise, thoughtful take on the stories that matter. Listen to Bloomberg Daybreak each morning on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. Last Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen advanced an unsubstantiated claim that the federal government has found 250 ,000 non-citizen voters on the rolls in several states.

13:34Alex Ebert:Mullen pledged to aggressively monitor public voter lists to pursue potential voter fraud cases before and after the 2026 election. He also threatens state officials who don't go along with the administration's election security demands. 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. What does Mullen want the states to do? Is he demanding that they put their voter rolls through the federal database, which, by the way, using the program was recently blocked by a federal judge over concerns about privacy and wrongful purges of eligible voters?

14:30That's a good question. DHS sent letters to these four states, and those letters were pretty tame. They said, you know, DHS had done an analysis and identified suspected, you know, potential non-citizens on the rolls, reminded the states that, you know, federal law requires them to maintain accurate voter rolls and that non-citizens are prohibited from voting in U.S. elections. But then otherwise just kind of said, you know, DHS is ready to help you if you need it. The letters were very, very tame. His remarks on Friday were not. And, you know, in his speech, he did both say that DHS is directing the states to remove all of those individuals from the rules, which, number one, DHS doesn't have the authority to direct states to do anything with their voter rolls.

15:14And number two, the states can't just take thousands of people off the rolls because somebody in the federal government tells them to. There's a process that they have to go through under both state and federal laws to verify those claims. They have to do their due diligence. They have to check. I imagine that the states will. They will take this seriously. But Secretary Mullen also, much like Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dillon did a couple of weeks ago, threatened election officials and said that they'll be prosecuted if they don't cooperate with the federal government. And I don't think that's an empty threat.

15:46I think that this administration is very willing to lean on its criminal enforcement authority and go after election officials if they don't go along with the administration's policy priorities when it comes to elections. Fortunately, I don't think that those charges would hold up. And election officials have very good counsel kind of across the board, have litigated against a lot of them. They know what they're doing. But it is alarming when senior officials in the federal government are threatening state and local election officials with criminal prosecution. You know, it's almost like it's like watching a mob movie to do what we want or else.

16:25And that's just not the relationship that we have seen between the federal government in the states in the past when it comes to elections. And, you know, the federal government typically provides resources and support and assistance to state and local election officials in carrying out their responsibilities. But this kind of aggressive posture towards election officials is really something new.

16:46Alex Ebert:As you mentioned, the Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states, you know, threatening criminal prosecution if election officials count any ballots cast by non-citizens. What law would they prosecute them under? I mean, there is a federal statute that says that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. I'm not sure that that statute attaches liability to the chief election official of a state. You know, that's the statute that DOJ would use to prosecute an individual who voted while ineligible. And, you know, I think that that is reflected in the responses that DOJ got from some of the state election officials, including several Republicans who did not take kindly to this, you know, explicit threat from the Justice Department.

17:37The Secretary of State of Idaho sent a pretty harsh response to the Department of Justice that was made public that basically said, don't bully us. We know what the laws are. It is our job to enforce them. It is our job to carry them out. This is not the way to get what you want. And this is not how a partnership between government officials is supposed to work. The lieutenant governor of Utah, who is the chief election official for that state, similarly had a very kind of angry public response to, you know, the Department of Justice sending these threatening letters out, you know, four months out from an election that were not tied to any sort of evidence or any specific investigation.

18:18It was the same letter that went out to every state. And so, you know, it's just, it's just political messaging, really. It's the administration trying to show that they are being tough on this issue. It's, you know, people in DOJ and DHS trying to signal to the president that they are taking it seriously. And it's really having an effect on the state and local election officials who are the ones being put on the chopping block here. And they're the ones doing all the work. They're the ones maintaining clean voter rolls and, you know, running elections with no help from the federal government.

18:49And in fact, now just just threats and bullying. I have to say, though, prosecuting election officials because a non-citizen votes sounds like an empty threat because that would be such a difficult prosecution.

19:06Alex Ebert:Of course, the Trump administration has been known to file charges even when the proof is weak. I think you're probably right. But, you know, if they do that, you know, election officials jobs don't end on election day. They have, you know, lots of responsibilities in the weeks and months that follow to canvas the results, to tabulate the results. They have to do audits and recounts and certify and all of that stuff. And even if they are baseless charges, it takes a lot of time and a lot of resources to defend against prosecution by the federal government. And election officials are already spread very thin, as far as resources are concerned, just to do their jobs, just to run the elections.

19:47And, you know, if you're a secretary of state, or even worse, if you are a county election official with limited resources, and you are trying to complete your legal obligations to canvas and tabulate and certify election results, and then all of a sudden, you have to go to a federal courthouse to, you know, to an arraignment, because DOJ has filed criminal charges against you, even if those charges are ultimately dismissed a few months later, it's a huge resource drain. It's incredibly disruptive to the administration of the election. And it's, you know, emotionally and physically taxing for election officials who haven't done anything wrong.

20:23So even if ultimately the threats are empty and DOJ is not able to convict anybody of anything, even just the threat of prosecution or, you know, election officials on the election system. And I worry that DOJ is trying, along with the DHS and the White House, to undermine the election system, both by putting this pressure on election officials and by trying to convince the public of their imagined problems with how our elections are run in an effort to make it easier for them to overturn the results if they don't like them.

21:00Alex Ebert:So do you think this would be then a repeat of 2020 where Trump and his allies went to court and claim the election was fraudulent? Or do you anticipate something different or even worse? It's hard to say. And I don't want to speculate too much because I don't want to just like spin out every single possibility in a way that might scare people with things that are not realistic. But I think the big difference between now and 2020 is that, you know, during the 2020 election, most, if not all, of the challenges to the results came from outside of the government. It was the campaign side of things that was really kind of driving the car there.

21:46Because you had people like Bill Barr, you know, who was a loyal foot soldier in the Trump administration for much of his tenure, but who drew the line at, you know, getting the Justice Department involved in challenging the results with no evidence. I don't think Todd Blanche would have the same hesitations. I don't think that Kash Patel is going to be a guardrail here and keep the FBI from getting involved in pursuing whatever false claims the president wants to pursue. Donald Trump has much more unified control of his party, of his government now than he did in 2020. And we've already seen the law enforcement arms of the federal government, both through DOJ and DHS, already leaning on election officials and trying to get themselves involved in election administration in ways that they didn't during the first Trump term.

22:41He's issued executive orders about elections this time around, and he didn't do that last time. You know, those orders have been largely blocked by the courts, but he's doing a lot more with different arms of the federal government already. So, you know, if the midterms don't go his way or his party's way, I expect that there'll be a lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall. I think he's going to try, you know, and pull every lever at his disposal to change those results. And the reason he's doing that is ultimately he doesn't have any power to decide how the midterms go. That is up to the voters. And so, you know, he's getting increasingly desperate.

23:16I think the speech and the declassification of documents and everything that's happened in the last week is proof of that. But, you know, ultimately, it is going to be up to up to voters, up to the public, up to, you know, organizations like like Campaign Legal Center who are litigating these issues to ensure that the will of the voters ultimately prevails in November, no matter which way it goes.

23:37Alex Ebert:Let's turn now to the Department of Justice's quest to get states to hand over unredacted voter rolls. DOJ is 0-16 in that quest. So 16 consecutive losses in court handed to them by both Democratic and Republican appointees. Why does the Justice Department want these unredacted voter rolls? That's a good question, because the Justice Department doesn't really have a role when it comes to voter registration. You know, I think that it has become apparent over the last several months, year and a half, that the administration is engaged in an increasingly desperate attempt to manufacture some kind of evidence to support the president's false claims about elections.

24:35And the folks at DOJ are either convinced or just trying to make the president happy, but they're convinced that they will be able to find evidence of illegal registrations or non-citizens on the rules if they can just get their hands on the state's unredacted voter files and wave some kind of magic wand to investigate all of those millions of voters. But unfortunately for them, the federal government has no legal authorization to obtain those files or do anything with them. And so when 30 states and D.C. refused to turn over their citizens' private data to the federal government, DOJ sued. They filed 31 lawsuits.

25:15And I think as of this morning, they have lost 16 of those and won zero.