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David Rind

00:00:00

'Welcome back to One Thing, I'm David Rind. And from mail-in ballots to your personal data, President Donald Trump wants to have a heavy hand in elections, but will states or the law let him?

Tierney Sneed

00:00:11

This is a place where constitutionally there's not much he can do unilaterally, but he sure is trying.

David Rind

00:00:20

Why did you feel compelled to intervene in this way? David.

David Yates

00:00:25

I think part of it is a little bit of fear.

David Rind

00:00:30

This is David Yates. He's the county clerk of Jefferson County, Kentucky. He was appointed to the role last fall after the previous clerk died. Part of David's job as clerk is handling records related to elections. Last month, in response to a lawsuit from the Trump administration's Justice Department seeking to collect voter data, he moved to try to prevent that from happening. We're going to be talking about this in depth in just a bit, but a quick backstory. Last year, the DOJ requested sensitive voter data from nearly every state. Kentucky's Republican Secretary of State said he believed the DO J had a legal right to some of the data and provided it to them. But he also said he was wary of violating privacy laws and redacted certain info like driver's license IDs and partial social security numbers.

David Yates

00:01:14

Apply with the law, he transferred over everything that was required, but then he received notice from the Department of Justice that we want more.

David Rind

00:01:22

They did want more. They wanted the full unredacted list. The DOJ has since sued Kentucky, plus 29 other states and the District of Columbia for that info, in what is gearing up to be a major legal fight heading into the midterms. Which brings David Yates back to the fear he was feeling, the fear of what could happen if the federal government does get its hands on this data.

David Yates

00:01:44

Through history has always shown us the best way to protect the elections is to have, you don't want concentration of power all in one place. That is too much power to give to any administration. The fear is that it could be abused. When you could arbitrarily remove people for voter files weeks before an election, the opportunity to abuse is too high.

David Rind

00:02:05

'I guess I could say that this administration, how they frame this is they're concerned about non-citizens ending up on voter rolls, potentially voting. Obviously, nobody wants insecure or fraudulent elections in any way. Nobody wants people to be voting who shouldn't be. So what's the issue if the government is using this data to find those violations? Well, so.

David Yates

00:02:26

'Everybody welcomes secure elections. I don't think there's any debate that in Kentucky how we go. Really far, you know, with our voter IDs and our checks and re-checks and post-election audits, and we go through, and so you're right, we do want secure elections. We do want to make sure that oversight is gone, but we know these massive voter files, if you were to centralize and to put it into a cross-reference with whether it's DHS or other government agencies, federal government agencies will not be as well done as at the local level where we actually Quick updated files either done before the federal government. We know that

David Rind

00:03:04

'Now, David's a Democrat. He knows that speaking out against this lawsuit could open him up to blowback from Trump supporters in his state. The president won it by 30 points in 2024, after all. But he insists there is bipartisan concern about this push for a centralized list of voter data. So with the state primary looming next month where David himself will be on the ballot running for a full four-year term as clerk, I wanted to know if he thought most Kentuckians had faith in the voting process.

David Yates

00:03:30

You know, I think that's a big part of my job, is to let people know your vote counts. Your voice matters. It's now more than ever. And I'm worried about the chilling effect of the constant rhetoric that it doesn't. We are registering people in droves. I'm seeing a turnout. It's for people, first time people registering.

David Rind

00:03:50

I mean, you didn't answer my question with a yes, is that concerning to you at all?

David Yates

00:03:54

Am I concerned that about the

David Rind

00:03:57

The answer to if people have faith in the voting process is not an easy yes.

David Yates

00:04:01

Yeah, no, it's not an easy yes. But now is the time we stand up and we fight. You raise your voice, not from a Democrat, Republican standpoint, so much as you do, is that you're a citizen, that your vote matters, it should count, and that any overreach by any administration should be checked.

David Rind

00:04:22

So what exactly is the Trump administration after with this data? And what happens when local officials not only go along with what the president is asking for, but take it a step further. Let's bring in CNN's Tyranny Sneed. She covers elections and the courts. Okay. So Tyranny, the last time we covered this topic on the show, president Trump was kind of floating this idea of nationalizing elections, to which constitutional experts said, that's not really a thing. So is this something the Trump administration is still focused on?

Tierney Sneed

00:04:49

They're certainly finding new ways every couple weeks we see something new to try to insert the federal government deeper into the mechanics of how elections are run. And as you mentioned, this is constitutionally questionable, if not outright unconstitutional, because the Constitution gives states the primary job of running elections. And it creates space for... Congress to come in and set some guardrails, but there's no part of the Constitution that gives the president unilateral power to say how elections are run. And so his relentless attempts to try to do things unilaterally that Congress will not do or states will not do is what is really causing alarm in the election community. Thank you.

David Rind

00:05:45

Right, so give me a few examples of what we've seen recently.

Tierney Sneed

00:05:49

So what we've seen, you know, the first big example of this was an executive order he signed in March 2025 that sought to boost proof of citizenship requirements. It sought to do new things on voting machine verification and it sought to put new rules around mail voting. The most significant provisions of that executive order have since been blocked by court. Then, in late spring and over the summer of last year, we saw this... New effort by the Justice Department that continues to be ongoing to collect sensitive voter roll data from states, basically demanding that states hand over their full voter rolls that can contain information like social security numbers or a voter's date of birth or their address or their driver's license ID. And they have gone so far as to sue 30 states plus the District of Columbia because most states have not. Sought to hand over this information voluntarily.

David Rind

00:06:49

What exactly do they want with this data?

Tierney Sneed

00:06:51

'And so that's the interesting thing, is that the story has really changed since this all started in late spring, summer of 2025. There is the sort of narrative that was given in court. There was the narrative that wasn't given to election officials privately. And then there was the sort comments that DOJ and White House leaders were making publicly. And we're finally starting to see all these stories align, thanks to some new comments that the DOJ made in court, as well as an executive order that Trump signed more recently dealing with non-citizen voting and mail ballots. And what it appears is that the DOJ, it doesn't even appear to be, we know this now, the DOJ plans to hand this data over to the Department of Homeland Security for the DHS agency to review for non-citizens using federal databases and specifically a tool called Save, which... Started as a tool to do benefits verification for immigrants, but now has turned into this tool that is made available for vetting voter rolls. And a lot of states, more than two dozen, use it voluntarily. But the concern here is it's one thing for a state to use it voluntary and to do additional vetting and review because this system is known to produce false positives and wrongly identify. Eligible voters as non-citizens, but for the federal government to come in and say we're going to do this for you and we're going to tell you who is a non- citizen voter who needs to be removed from the role. Right, you just told me that.

David Rind

00:08:26

Right, you just told me that the states run the election.

Tierney Sneed

00:08:28

'Exactly, exactly. So that is causing a lot of heartburn for election officials, including Republican election officials who like to use Save and who have praised the administration for making it easier to use. They still have their own state laws and procedures to follow to make sure that they're not removing eligible voters from their roles. And their concern is the federal government is going to come in and tell them who's ineligible and who's non-citizen and pressure them to remove them. Whether those claims have been properly vetted or not, and if states don't go along with these purges, that Trump will then accuse states of having dirty rolls and cast doubt on elections, particularly if Republicans don't do well in the midterms.

David Rind

00:09:13

'So if the stated goal here is to find non-citizens on these voter rolls, make sure they aren't voting in federal elections, how common is it for non-citizens to end up on these rolls?

Tierney Sneed

00:09:26

'You know, non-citizens do end up on the rolls, and there's a lot of reasons for that. Election officials make mistakes, obviously people get registered to vote when they get driver's license and mistakes can be made. But election officials have tools to remove people who are not supposed to be on the rolls. And the thing that we have to emphasize is that just because someone has gotten on the roll doesn't mean that they're voting. So yes, states have said, you know, especially using tools like Save, they might find. Dozens of non-citizens, or maybe a couple hundred non-Citizens at most, but when they actually look to see who's voting, it's really, really, REALLY small.

David Rind

00:10:07

Like how small?

Tierney Sneed

00:10:08

'Like, you know, a handful in a state over the course of, you know, 10 or 20 years. You know, I was just looking at a stat that it was, you know, South Dakota found 275-ish non-citizens on their roles when they needed a review, but only one had actually voted in 2016. So there's this idea of, if this is a small problem, if it's a problem we have tools to deal with already, do we risk disenfranchising eligible people? And using these sort of blunt instruments to go after, you know, suspected non-citizen, particularly if you're using tools like Save that are known to produce false positives. And I think the Doge experience has really frightened election officials. There was an episode that the DOJ had to explain in a court filing a couple of months ago on which a Doge staffer at their Social Security administration had entered an agreement with an unnamed political group to share Social Security data with that group because that group wanted to use that data to challenge elections. And I should say that the DOJ did not say in this court filing that that data was ultimately shared. It just said that there was an agreement reached. But even just the fact that, you know, this rogue Doge staffer at Social Security would agree to that is, you now, a five alarm fire for election officials when they're deciding whether to give this data to the government. And it's come up, and some of the letters that state officials have sent to DOJ saying you're not turning over this data.

Dana Bash

00:11:46

In the state of Idaho, a very Republican state, that is now the latest to face a lawsuit from the DOJ. The administration...

Tierney Sneed

00:11:54

'So, in just the last week or two, we saw the Trump administration unveil a couple new lawsuits targeting Republican-led states. One of those states, Oklahoma, did settle their lawsuit and agree to turn over their data. The others are fighting the lawsuits and defending in court their decisions not to produce the data.

Dana Bash

00:12:14

Idaho's Republican Secretary of State, Phil McCrane, rejected demands for unredacted voter rolls, including sensitive information like Social Security numbers.

Tierney Sneed

00:12:24

We're also hearing my colleague Gabe Cohen reported in a story that we published that there's new ideas being floated within the administration to put pressure on states to turn over their voter data. And one of those ideas was put forward by Heather Honey. She's an election skeptic, election denier, who has now landed a key role in the administration at DHS doing election security. And she floated the idea of withholding FEMA security money. That's doled out to states, kind of using that as leverage and withholding that from states that are refusing to turn over the rules.

David Rind

00:12:59

Oh, wow. So, like, there's this FEMA money, presumably for disasters or emergencies, and the Trump administration would basically be like in this hypothetical scenario, oh, shame is something were to happen to that money if you don't follow the rules.

Tierney Sneed

00:13:12

And we should say, you know, we reached out to FEMA and DHS and they said nothing's changed in their grant programs, but it's something we're going to have to watch. And I should note that part of what's going on here is that the DOJ is not yet really winning in court on this. A handful of courts have, you know, produced... Final rulings in these, you know, state lawsuits, and they've all gone against the DOJ. Some of these cases are going up to appeals courts now, and Harmeet Dullin, the civil rights head who's spearheading these lawsuits at DOJ, has said she wants to take this to the Supreme Court, but you know that things are not going well in court for the DO J on this. So you can see the administration looking for new ideas to pressure states to turn this over.

David Rind

00:13:58

'Gotta take a break. When we come back, Trump tries to put his stamp on mail-in voting. Stick around.

President Donald Trump

00:14:14

'Because the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary, it's horrible what's going on.

David Rind

00:14:20

'Tierney, what about mail-in voting? Because I know President Trump has railed on that for years and years.

Tierney Sneed

00:14:27

So he has consistently said that he does not want people to vote my mail unless they have a very narrow set of excuses.

President Donald Trump

00:14:36

For the military, for people that are sick, people that are traveling, for the disabled. We have very generous exceptions.

Tierney Sneed

00:14:45

So he doesn't want no excuse to mail voting, which several states have adopted. And the irony, of course, is that he has voted by mail as recently as a couple of weeks ago in an election in Palm Beach. And again, this is a place where constitutionally there's not much he can do unilaterally, but he sure is trying.

President Donald Trump

00:15:04

I don't see how they can challenge it. And remember, it's about voter integrity. We want to have honest voting in our country. Because if you don't have honest voting, you can't have really a nation, if you want to know the truth.

Tierney Sneed

00:15:17

One of the things he tried, which first manifested in the 2025 executive order, was to crack down on states that allow ballots that are postmarked by election day to come into election offices within a few days or maybe as far as a week or two out from an election. That's now a question before the Supreme Court, and we'll get a decision on that by the end of June. The latest executive order seeks to use the US Postal Service to sort of attack mail voting.

Howard Lutnick

00:15:46

If they want to use the US mail, the US postal service, they're going to get a code, a bar code from the US Postal Service and they're gonna put that on the envelope and we will have one envelope per vote. None of this is mine. What it does.

Tierney Sneed

00:16:01

'What it does is say the US Postal Service will get lists from states where states will have to tell the US postal service 60 days in advance who are on their mail voting lists. And then the postal service will get to sort of decide whether it mails those ballots, whether states are meeting all these other requirements. You know, they have these requirements that states have, their ballot envelopes have the sort of automated trackers. That allow voters to track their ballots through the mail. And election experts say that as a standard operating procedure, that would be an ideal thing for states and local jurisdictions to do. But it's certainly not the place of the president to unilaterally impose that requirement through the US Postal Service. And it's not even workable for these really small jurisdictions that just don't have the infrastructure to institute that, particularly on a very fast turnaround for this election. And it's sort of implied in this executive order that the USPS would be also looking at these lists against whatever list the government is, the federal government is putting together of who is a citizen, non-citizen and using that as well, even though that's not...

David Rind

00:17:13

So it's like, not only are you talking about the DOJ having access to this data from the states, but now you're bringing the postal service into that. Exactly. You have a lot of experts asking you, like, what the heck does the postal services have? Exactly. And they

Tierney Sneed

00:17:24

Exactly. And, you know, I've talked to experts who are right in this space of helping states manage their mail voting processes. And like the idea that the postal service has the resources to decide who can and cannot get a ballot is also just like not plausible. And so this executive order has been challenged in court. There's several lawsuits challenging it. The broad consensus among legal experts is that it's going to be blocked pretty quickly. So we'll just wait and see as those cases unfold. So every state official, Republican or Democrat alike, has to sort of decide how they're going to navigate this, because there's just immense political pressure on them too. There's local officials who are getting frustrated with the state election chiefs are not going along with the Trump administration plan. There's a local activists who are pressuring them. And so they're really in a tough position in deciding how do I meet the political demands of the Trump base wanting me to go along with this while also following the law and protecting my voters and doing my job as the administrator of elections.

David Rind

00:18:34

Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say, what does that actually look like on the ground?

Tierney Sneed

00:18:37

'Yeah, so we're seeing a couple of different trends. One is we're seen a lot of states adopt the same sort of citizenship requirements, the proof of citizenship requirements that Trump tried to do unilaterally last year. And this would be requiring that their voters show a passport or some other form of verification to show that they're citizens when they register to vote. A second thing we're see is sort of local officials really promoting their own investigations into non-citizen voters. And we're seeing this trend of local officials, particularly local officials who might be running for higher office and are hoping to kind of rile up the base, really sort of exaggerate what they're finding.

Chad Bianco

00:19:23

Good morning, everyone. I'm Chad Bianco, Riverside County Sheriff.

Tierney Sneed

00:19:27

One prominent example of sort of following the DOJ playbook of actually seizing battle

Anchor

00:19:32

A Southern California sheriff has seized more than 600,000 ballots in an investigation that is tied to alleged voter fraud.

Tierney Sneed

00:19:40

I'm talking about Riverside County Sheriff. That's a county in California, east of Los Angeles.

Reporter

00:19:47

Bianco, who has a history of repeating President Trump's false claims about election fraud, ordered 650,000 ballots seized from last fall's Prop 50 special election based on accusations from a citizens group with a history of election denialism that there were 45,000 questionable ballots.

Tierney Sneed

00:20:06

'This is something that had been percolating in that county for a while, but in February, he got a warrant to seize hundreds of thousands of ballots in the special election last year dealing with mid-cycle redistricting in the state.

Chad Bianco

00:20:21

I hope we can all agree there is no acceptable error, small or large, in our elections, let alone a 45,000 vote difference. Our investigation will determine the validity of that alleged discrepancy and if found true we will determine the cause.

Tierney Sneed

00:20:39

And is currently in a court battle with the Democratic State Attorney General over whether it's proper for him to seize these ballots and do what he says is a criminal probe, but he also talks about as verifying the election.

David Rind

00:20:55

And this guy's a sheriff, right? Like he's not actually an election official.

Tierney Sneed

00:20:59

Yes, and I talked to his lawyer a couple of weekends ago and asked him how you are planning to do this, what he wants to do is physically count all these ballots. His lawyer said, well, they handle evidence all the time and we studied sort of the best protocols for how to do the count.

Dana Bash

00:21:16

The California Supreme Court puts the brakes on Bianco's controversial ballot investigation, at least for now.

Reporter

00:21:22

We still don't know where the ballots are and when Bianco may release them.

Tierney Sneed

00:21:35

And one of the things that we're going to have to see is how judges are going to sort of address this issue if this becomes a trend and what happens if this is, you know, in the middle of the midterms, you know that this is the day or two after the midterm and there's these allegations in private priority and we're not going through normal recount procedures. We're having a, you now, a sheriff or some, you know law enforcement's agency that doesn't normally do this sort of election work come in and seize ballots.

David Rind

00:22:03

Yeah, I mean, that's what I wanted to ask, like, because people are voting already in primaries, like, have any of these efforts by the Trump administration or these local officials who have kind of taken it on themselves to go through the rolls, is any of that impacting the election process thus far?

Tierney Sneed

00:22:20

I think what election officials are really worried about at this point is how even just the atmospherics could affect people's confidence. My colleague, Frederica Shoden, heard from some local election officials recently who said, we are already getting calls from people who think, you know, the Save America Act, which is like the congressional bill to do proof of citizenship, is law. And so people are already kind of getting confused and thinking that there are requirements a vote that don't exist at least yet. And there's this concern when you ask them, oh, how are you preparing for Trump administration meddling, when you talk to election officials, they're very, very careful about what they want to say on the record. Because on the one hand, they want assure those voters that they are prepared, that they have lawsuits ready to go, that their thinking through ways to sort of mitigate emergency situations. But if you spend too much time speculating like worst case scenarios of what the Trump administration will do, voters might take that as a sign that the Trump administration is going to do that and preemptively lose confidence and not show up because they think it's already rigged or it's already being tampered with.

David Rind

00:23:30

It seems like 2020 in the aftermath of that election really broke something in this system where there is just this kind of creeping doubt on either side of where you might fall on this and it just seems like nobody can put the genie back in the bottle at this point.

Tierney Sneed

00:23:48

Yes, it's really hard to imagine how we would kind of rewind the clock on where we are now. And one of the things we're seeing is just a really high rate of burnout and turnover within election offices, that you're losing a lot of experienced people who've been doing this for decades because the environment is so hostile. And, you know, that's only increasing when you see Trump executive orders or laws or proposals being considered in Congress that would add criminal penalties for election officials for not following certain procedures.

President Donald Trump

00:24:29

They don't want voter ID, the Democrats, because they want to cheat.

Tierney Sneed

00:24:33

'You know, what they say at every turn is, why are states resisting this? It's because they're cheating and they need their dirty rolls to win. And elections are complicated. It's hard to, in a soundbite, explain the sort of nuances of what some of these sort of tools that sound on the surface to be kind of well-intentioned good ideas, but you kind of have to look under the hood and see there are some issues in how you them and that there's got to be some guardrails and how you go about. Doing some of these procedures and that's why we've always left it to the states and to local officials who are kind of closest to the ground and understand their community's needs to decide how to best run elections.

David Rind

00:25:14

Well, Tierney, thank you for bringing us up to speed on all this. I really appreciate it.

Tierney Sneed

00:25:18

It was great to be here.

David Rind

00:25:23

All right, that's all we've got for today. Thank you as always for listening. If you like the show, make sure you tell us about it. Leave a rating and a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show. We're gonna be back with another episode on Wednesday and I will talk to you then.

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