A group of five Senate Democrats has formally accused Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin of trying to assert improper federal control over state election administration, in a letter reported September 29, 2026, that lands squarely in the middle of the runup to the midterms.
Who is making the accusation
The letter was signed by Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Gary Peters of Michigan, Alex Padilla of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York. The senators wrote to Mullin, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma whom President Trump appointed to lead the Department of Homeland Security, alleging his agency has engaged in what they call ‘illegal activities’ aimed at shaping how states run their elections.
The central dispute: a disputed fraud figure
At the heart of the letter is DHS’s claim that roughly 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote across four states — a figure the senators say is unfounded and unsupported by verifiable evidence. The dispute echoes a pattern seen in state-level fights over the SAVE database and similar citizenship-verification tools, where civil rights groups and now sitting senators argue official noncitizen-voting estimates are being used to justify aggressive, and potentially unlawful, federal pressure on states.
Specific allegations against DHS
The senators’ letter lays out several specific claims: that DHS pressured states to share voter registration data under threat of losing grant funding or facing federal criminal investigations if they refused; and that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staff were allegedly instructed to use sensitive personal information to impersonate voters and access state voter-registration websites. The letter also alleges USCIS staff were directed to create law-enforcement records on individuals — including U.S. citizens — for possible referral to Homeland Security Investigations. The senators characterized the impersonation allegation, which they attribute to a whistleblower account, as alarming ‘if true.’
What the senators are arguing
The letter’s opening line warns that DHS’s actions ‘seek to undermine the Constitutional authority of both Congress and states to administer elections,’ a reference to the Constitution’s assignment of election administration primarily to the states. The senators stressed the timing, noting pointedly that ‘the 2026 midterm elections are already underway,’ and arguing that conditioning federal grant funding on states’ willingness to hand over voter data risks wrongly disenfranchising eligible voters caught up in flawed data-matching.
No public DHS rebuttal yet
As of the senators’ letter becoming public, DHS had not issued a detailed public response to the specific allegations. The dispute follows months of tension between the administration and state election officials — including in Arizona, where DHS separately sought records related to the 2020 election — over how much federal involvement in state voter-roll maintenance is appropriate versus overreaching.
What it means for the midterms
The accusations add a new flashpoint to an already fraught environment around election administration just weeks before voters head to the polls. If true, the whistleblower allegations about USCIS staff using voter data to access state registration systems would represent a significant escalation in federal-state friction over elections; if unfounded, they nonetheless reflect the depth of distrust between the parties over how citizenship-verification efforts are being carried out. Either way, the letter signals that Senate Democrats intend to make DHS’s role in election administration a live issue through November, while Mullin’s department has given no indication it plans to scale back its data-sharing requests from the states.
Photo: Ron Cogswell / BY via flickr
