SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The new secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, has, for years, amplified President Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 election, and his history of pushing election misinformation matters this midterm year. NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks explains.
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GARY BERNTSEN: One of the things that we learned is there's 14 different technical ways that you can steal an election.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: That's Gary Berntsen, a former CIA operative who is convinced of the falsehood that Venezuela stole the 2020 election. The only problem is, as he explained in this interview with conservative podcaster Lara Logan, he couldn't get anyone to listen to him. Ahead of the 2024 race, he went to the FBI, then the media. No one gave him the time of day. Until...
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BERNTSEN: One politician in America was not afraid.
LARA LOGAN: Who was that?
BERNTSEN: Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
LOGAN: Yes. Yes.
BERNTSEN: He's a real man, that guy.
LOGAN: He's a real man.
PARKS: Allies of Berntsen say Mullin, then a senator from Oklahoma, got Berntsen and his partner in front of President Trump's team at Mar-a-Lago to push conspiracy theories that are still floating around on the far right two years later, which gets to a larger truth about the incoming secretary of Homeland Security. He is all-in on election denial.
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MARKWAYNE MULLIN: What undermines the election is letting fraud and deception steal the election from the real American people that voted legally.
PARKS: That's Mullin speaking to a local TV station shortly after voting ended in 2020. Even on January 6, 2021, after a mob overran the U.S. Capitol during the certification, Mullin was one of 147 congressional Republicans who voted not to certify the results, and he still seems to feel the election was rigged. At his confirmation hearing in March, Mullin declined to say who won when he was asked directly by Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan.
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ELISSA SLOTKIN: Who won the 2020 election?
MULLIN: Ma'am, we know that President Joe Biden was sworn into office.
SLOTKIN: That...
MULLIN: He was the...
SLOTKIN: That's not. We know...
MULLIN: ...President for the last four years.
PARKS: That sort of hedging worries voting officials and experts as they look ahead to the midterms.
KATHY BOOCKVAR: It's not something to joke about, but there is a dark irony to it.
PARKS: Kathy Boockvar was Pennsylvania's top voting official in 2020. The irony she's talking about is Mullin now heading an agency that declared in 2020 that that election was the most secure in American history.
States and local governments run their own elections with little input from the federal government, but there are still ways that a federal law enforcement agency can sow chaos or delegitimize results if so desired. One thing many voting officials are worried about is immigration enforcement, which falls under DHS. In an interview last month on "The Charlie Kirk Show," border czar Tom Homan seemed open to the possibility of ICE officers at polling places, and he noted DHS' role in election security.
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TOM HOMAN: I mean, bottom line is, what are they afraid of? They say illegal aliens don't vote. But look, you know, part of DHS's job is secure elections, and I'm not going to say, you know, what our plan is going forward. But if only U.S. citizens can vote, I don't see the issue.
PARKS: At his confirmation hearing, Mullin said DHS agents would only be present at polling places if there was a specific threat they were protecting against. And in a statement to NPR about this story, DHS said Secretary Mullin is, quote, "committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens, and only American citizens, are electing American leaders."
Mullin is also far from the only person who denies the 2020 election results who's in a position of power in the Trump administration. But voting officials from both parties say the elevation of people in DHS specifically undoes a decade of election security work. After Russia interfered in the 2016 race, the federal government spent years, including during the first Trump administration, working to improve threat monitoring and coordination among the nation's 10,000 or so local election jurisdictions. Officials now say that work has completely stopped.
MATT CRANE: It breaks my heart.
PARKS: That's Matt Crane, a Republican former county clerk who now runs the professional organization for local voting officials in Colorado. He says he's now actively discouraging local governments from sharing voter data or any other information with DHS this midterm year.
CRANE: I don't trust how the administration is using that data. I don't trust that they're going to keep it confidential. And so I can't in good conscience advocate that any of my counties do any work with them right now.
PARKS: Boockvar, the former voting official in Pennsylvania, said trust between the federal government and local voting officials has been, quote, "eradicated." Miles Parks, NPR News, Washington.
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