Federal pressure on state election officials is reaching a boiling point. After demanding states hand over voters’ sensitive personal data, including partial Social Security and driver’s license numbers, the Justice Department sued 30 states and D.C. going 0-for-17 this year in federal court.
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Instead of backing down, Washington is escalating: the Department of Justice and Homeland Security are warning officials across all 50 states and D.C. they could face criminal prosecution over how they manage their rolls. Now, chief election officials across the West — Republicans and Democrats alike — are refusing to be intimidated and they are right to stand their ground.
As a military veteran who has worked alongside these officials, I can tell you DOJ and DHS have it backward. These threats are baseless and constitute an insult to the citizens and election officials who have spent their careers getting elections right.
Through Vet the Vote, our campaign at We the Veterans & Military Families, we have recruited more than 165,000 veterans and military family members as poll workers spanning nearly every state across the country. In Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and Utah, more than 10,000 of them have stepped forward. These recruitment efforts, along with my time as a resident in two of these states, put me in the same room as some of the officials now being threatened.
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, was born into a military family. Having spent time with Henderson, I know she takes her role in Utah’s elections seriously. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar has backed Vet the Vote from the start, and his elections deputy, Mark Wlaschin, is a 20-year Marine. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat and fellow Marine, has partnered with We the Veterans and Vet the Vote. Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, co-hosted a poll worker recruitment event with us in 2024 and will do so again this year.
When claims were raised that noncitizens were corrupting voter rolls, these officials checked. Henderson reviewed Utah’s two million voters and found that 99.9% were confirmed citizens, with zero evidence of anyone voting illegal. McGrane ran Idaho’s 1.1 million voters against state and federal databases, removed the few he found, and referred about fifteen cases for prosecution.
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Nevada verifies every registration through layered identity checks and routinely prunes outdated ones. In Arizona, the state has required documentary proof of citizenship since 2004, one of the nation’s strictest standards. That strict standard exempts only voters who use the federal form, a gap created in Washington, D.C., not Phoenix. When a long-buried database error surfaced, Arizona’s own officials found and moved to fix it. Errors — rare as they are — run both ways. They serve as an argument for careful state administration, not federal overreach and threats.
The U.S. Constitution leaves voter roll integrity and maintenance to the states. None of this means Washington has no role. Accurate rolls matter, and the federal government has a legitimate interest. There is a line between lawfully inspecting records and seizing them, between legitimate oversight and the threat of prison.
I don’t recruit veterans to protect our system of self-government just so I can watch the people safeguarding it get bullied for doing their jobs. The oaths taken by election officials every year echo the same one every veteran and active-duty military leader has taken: to support and defend the Constitution.
We can trust the system, and the thousands of elected leaders who have taken up the duty to protect it. It’s natural to be skeptical, so don’t take my word for it. See for yourself by signing up to serve as a poll worker this year. See the process up close, follow logic-and-accuracy testing and the election audit. The safeguards are public, and they hold up. That way, when the officer who runs your elections is threatened for following the law, you can call it out too.
These officials have shown their work. We should stand behind them.