Federal actions around voting system expand — 60 Minutes

[0:01] The midterms are just two weeks away, and President Trump is using his power to intimidate [0:07] the people who run our elections, putting the voting system under remarkable stress. [0:14] The latest move came on Friday, when the Justice Department threatened to prosecute California [0:20] election officials if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from 20,000 people the Trump [0:26] administration says are likely non-citizens. [0:30] It's the latest in a sequence of actions that has bred an erosion of faith in the integrity [0:36] of our elections. [0:38] Our story focuses on how state and local election officials are being pressured in a way that [0:44] is stoking that distrust. [0:47] We start with what happened in Georgia this past January. [0:51] This is a criminal search warrant. [0:54] What you're seeing is extraordinary. [0:56] This is an FBI scene. [0:58] Armed federal agents seizing ballots from a local election facility. [1:03] In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI of all things. [1:09] Fulton County Commissioner Democrat Dana Barrett got a text message that sent her racing to [1:16] this warehouse near Atlanta. [1:18] Were the FBI agents inside by the time you got here? [1:22] They were. [1:23] They were. [1:24] They had vests. [1:25] They had guns. [1:26] They had all of the equipment on their belts as if they were raiding a drug house. [1:30] Yeah. [1:31] Can we look at that? [1:32] There were dozens of agents who gained entry to the warehouse with a criminal search warrant [1:37] that allowed them to seize ballots and other election materials from the 2020 election. [1:42] Is there any way that you could have said no? [1:47] No. [1:48] They had a valid warrant signed by a judge. [1:51] We did not have a choice. [1:53] The agents worked all day packing up more than 600 boxes of election records. [1:59] After Knight fell and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard arrived, the boxes were loaded [2:06] onto trucks and disappeared. [2:10] Where are the ballots now? [2:12] We have no idea. [2:14] You don't know where they took them? [2:16] Nope. [2:17] Do you know what they were going for? [2:18] Look, it was, in my opinion, political theater aimed at undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections. [2:26] You think it was an intimidation for the next election? [2:31] I think it was all part of this concerted effort that's happening nationwide to undermine faith [2:37] in elections. [2:38] We obtained this internal FBI email temporarily reassigning 260 analysts to work on a priority [2:48] investigation into the Georgia materials. [2:52] That was three months ago, and nothing has come of it yet. [2:56] There have been dozens of probes into the 2020 election in Georgia, and none have moved the [3:02] needle. [3:03] You take a fraudulent claim, you investigate it at the state level. [3:06] Then the federal level refers to what the state did, and people just see all of these investigations [3:12] and FBI raids and subpoenas, and they say, something must be wrong there. [3:16] Why should I believe the results? [3:19] The Trump administration has cast more doubt about the reliability of our elections by [3:24] investigating voting machines and actual ballots, which the Justice Department has attempted [3:30] in several states. [3:31] I was a political science major at the time. [3:33] The Lieutenant Governor of Utah, Deidra Henderson, told us it's a kind of interference she's never [3:39] seen before. [3:40] In the past, two elections that I oversaw as Lieutenant Governor, the threats were all [3:45] external. [3:46] Non-state actors, cyber security threats, and other things. [3:51] But now we also have threats coming from within our own government. [3:56] Your federal government? [3:57] That's right. [3:59] There is a sample ballot like a… [4:01] Henderson is responsible for Utah's elections. [4:04] Does this verify citizenship, or do the clerks do that? [4:07] From voter registration to counting the ballots on Election Day. [4:12] Keep in mind, Henderson is a Republican in a deeply red state. [4:18] President Trump won the last election here by more than 20 points. [4:22] This is your office. [4:23] The room where it happens. [4:24] Last year, the Justice Department zoned in on Henderson and her counterparts in states [4:30] across the country, demanding their statewide voter registration list, which includes voters' [4:37] confidential personal information. [4:40] Henderson had never seen anything like it. [4:43] She said no. [4:44] They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private. [4:51] Social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver's license numbers. [4:55] Why? [4:56] Why did they want that? [4:58] We just weren't given very good answers. [5:01] And we were concerned about what they would do with that data. [5:06] Those in 29 other states, Democrat and Republican, felt the same. [5:11] And so they also refused to comply. [5:14] The Justice Department has sued all of them, saying it needs access to voter rolls to help [5:20] ensure that immigrants who are not entitled to vote don't. [5:25] They think that you're allowing ineligible voters to go and vote, and they feel it's [5:32] a federal obligation to stop that. [5:35] Why is that wrong? [5:37] Across the board, nobody I know wants anyone who isn't eligible to be able to vote. [5:44] State audits have shown that non-citizen voting is extremely rare, though it does happen. [5:51] In Utah, Henderson found only 52 who were questionable out of more than 2 million voters. [5:58] We did a calculation that that's 2 thousandths of 1 percent. [6:06] So has it ever been an issue in Utah? [6:09] No. [6:10] Henderson has been notified that if she knowingly allows any non-citizens to vote in Utah, she [6:17] could be prosecuted and even sent to prison. [6:20] Election security is national security. [6:23] In July, Secretary of Homeland Security Mark Wayne Mullins spelled it out. [6:28] Those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending [6:35] on how far it goes, prison time. [6:36] Election officials in California have been put on notice too. [6:42] The Justice Department has threatened to prosecute them for essentially the same crime. [6:47] And President Trump put out a social media post Friday about California. [6:53] They will all go to jail for a long period of time. [6:57] You could go to prison. [6:58] We're not going to prison. [7:00] No. [7:01] It's silly. [7:03] You're absolutely sure? [7:04] Well. [7:06] She's right to say, well. [7:09] The Justice Department told Henderson last month she's officially under investigation. [7:15] You are toe-to-toe with the President of the United States. [7:18] It's a big thing that you're doing. [7:21] I'm just doing my job. [7:23] Standing up to the federal government that's threatening you with jail time, it's bold, [7:30] at the very least. [7:31] I have to, I have to tell myself, it doesn't matter what the consequences are, if, as long [7:39] as I feel like I'm doing what's right. [7:41] I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guardrails, holding the line. [7:48] Someone has to. [7:50] Other Republicans, like Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming, also pushed back when election [7:55] monitors from the Justice Department in August demanded access to his voting machines. [8:01] I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns. [8:06] I don't like that. [8:07] And I don't like the federal government coming in and taking our votes either. [8:10] The federal government should get involved. [8:13] Things escalated when President Trump defied history and the Constitution with a shocking [8:18] statement on a podcast. [8:20] The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting [8:26] in at least many, 15 places. [8:30] The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. [8:32] In America, elections are local. [8:35] They're run by towns and counties and states. [8:39] It's all in Article I of the Constitution. [8:43] Congress makes laws regulating elections. [8:45] This country is so sick because of the election, the fake elections. [8:49] But the president doesn't have a role in running them. [8:53] That hasn't stopped Mr. Trump from signing two executive orders trying to create new federal [8:59] voting rules. [9:00] And it's an honor to sign this one, to sign all of them, but to sign this one is a great [9:05] honor. [9:07] Non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections, so the question is simply how many of them [9:12] there are. [9:13] Harmi Dillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, has spearheaded [9:18] the government's voter roll initiative. [9:21] She spoke to us from California. [9:23] There are people who feel that the point is to sow distrust about the whole election system. [9:30] There are very few people who are non-citizens who end up voting, very, very few. [9:36] And so therefore, what's the purpose? [9:39] The point is actually the opposite of what you were saying, is not to sow distrust. [9:42] The distrust is there. [9:44] And so all of these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time, really, [9:49] in volume. [9:50] And even the Biden administration prosecuted 13 people for non-citizen voting. [9:55] Thirteen people. [9:57] I mean, the numbers are tiny. [10:00] So Leslie, we've been in office for less than two years. [10:03] We've had investigations ongoing for over a year. [10:06] And it takes time. [10:08] There are literally thousands of them out there that we are looking at. [10:11] The pileup of investigations, charges of voting hanky-panky, have caused voters to lose [10:18] faith in our election system. [10:19] They try to rig elections. [10:22] Democrats have cast doubt on our elections, too. [10:25] We will not let their scheme to rig the midterm election and beyond be successful. [10:29] But it's a question of degree. [10:32] The 2020 election was rigged. [10:34] In the 21 months of President Trump's second term, he has said, in so many words, the vote [10:41] can't be trusted more than 150 times. [10:44] Please raise your right hand. [10:48] The president is only turning up the volume. [10:51] Listen to him at the Republican midterm convention last month asking his supporters to make a promise. [10:58] That I will go out with my family, my friends. [11:02] I'll do it anyway. [11:04] I don't care if I'm registered or not. [11:06] I'm going to try and cheat like hell like they do. [11:09] One argument is that when the president of the United States keeps saying that the system's [11:14] rigged, people lose confidence. [11:17] You don't think it's rigged, do you? [11:19] In terms of rigged, I definitely think that there were irregularities in prior elections. [11:23] But I think people are more sensitive to it now. [11:26] Is the administration planning to send ICE agents out to the polling places? [11:33] There's no plan to do that. [11:35] Dillon dismissed that concern and called the notion that President Trump might challenge [11:40] the results of the midterms paranoia. [11:43] So would you consider a non-citizen voting an irregularity that would lead to a challenge [11:51] of the vote? [11:52] I think that would lead to that person's vote being challenged, but not the entire election. [11:58] What I'm hearing you say is that you think it's very unlikely that a vote, a state vote, [12:05] will be challenged. [12:06] But people worry about that. [12:08] Can you rule it out? [12:09] Well, I don't know what's going to happen. [12:11] But I can tell you that, absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should [12:19] be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states. [12:25] With just 16 days till the election, polls are showing that only half of Americans expect [12:31] the midterms to be free and fair. [12:34] We have swing states where elections are almost always really razor thin close. [12:40] What about Wisconsin? [12:41] What about Georgia? [12:43] Can they have honest, fair elections? [12:45] They can have honest and fair elections. [12:48] Whether or not the losing candidates accept those results is the question. [12:52] And we are seeing a trend of candidates who lose races now refusing to concede, saying it [12:59] was rigged, saying it wasn't fair, even when it isn't close. [13:02] Candidates who lose can do so much good by graciously conceding. [13:09] And that will instill confidence in the public.