Padilla Warns Secretaries of State of Trump’s Threats to Elections, Urges Them to Defend the Right to Vote

Address follows Padilla letter demanding DOJ cease voter roll pressure campaign in response to AG Bondi's letter to Minnesota Governor Walz linking ICE and CBP deployment to the state's voter rolls

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and California's former Secretary of State, spoke to the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) Elections Committee, sounding the alarm on the Trump Administration's serious threats to election administration and security, while pushing states' chief election officials to protect the fundamental right to vote.

Padilla denounced the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) lawsuits against 24 states, including California, to coerce them into handing over unredacted access to their voting rolls, which contain voters' personally identifiable information. He slammed Attorney General Pam Bondi's recent letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz pushing him to surrender the state's voter rolls as part of an exchange for the Administration calling off its dangerous deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and agents to Minneapolis, an operation that has already led to the unjustified killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

"Don't get me started on how they've chosen to go about immigration enforcement across the country, but to me, it's pretty telling. Is it really about public safety in Minnesota, or is it about trying to get the voter data that they've been desperately trying to get for almost eight years now?" said Senator Padilla. "That's the environment that we're living in and working in. The whole country sees it for what it is, I know I see it for what it is, and Congress will continue to assert its role in all of this."

Padilla continued to sound the alarm on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's undertested, flawed Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, warning that running voter registration lists through this program could lead to illegal voter purges and puts voters' sensitive, private data at risk of falling into the wrong hands, including outside election denier groups looking to overturn election results.

Padilla highlighted President Trump's repeated attempts to change or preempt election laws, despite power over elections residing with Congress and the states, not the Executive Branch. He criticized Trump's efforts to weaponize the Election Assistance Commission through his illegal anti-voter executive order, much of which has already been blocked by federal courts. At the same time, Padilla raised concerns that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has paused all election security-focused activities, and denounced this week's chilling actions by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the FBI in raiding Fulton County, Georgia's elections office to further perpetuate the repeatedly disproven lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

As Republican legislators resurface the SAVE Act - legislation that would disenfranchise millions of eligible American citizens if passed - Padilla emphasized that the bill, in addition to creating major obstacles for married women, servicemembers and their families, and minority and rural communities, would make the critical election work Secretaries of State do exponentially more difficult. He slammed the false pretense for the SAVE Act, calling it "a solution in search of a problem" as voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and he vowed to defeat it in the Senate.

Yesterday, Padilla and Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) led a letter urging Attorney General Bondi to cease DOJ's pressure campaign to obtain voters' sensitive data and potentially purge voter rolls and posed a series of oversight questions to the Department about how it is pursuing this campaign, what it is doing with state voter data, and how it will protect it from leaks and hacks, in light of the recent revelations of DOGE staff at the Social Security Administration (SSA) sharing data with an unidentified group seeking to investigate the 2020 election, via an unauthorized secret agreement. Last October, Padilla and Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.) filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit opposing the Trump Administration's illegal ongoing attempts to purge state voter rolls across the country by developing a massive interagency database of Americans' sensitive personal data.

Key Excerpts from Remarks, as Delivered:

• If there was any reminder that we all needed of the urgency of the situation, I call your attention to what happened in Georgia yesterday, where none other than Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, joined the FBI in invading a local elections office in the state of Georgia, trying to recover materials from the 2020 election. I guess they're still searching for 11,000 more votes. But it should be a reminder or a wake-up call that this can happen at any point, once again, between now and this coming November.

• It is, in fact, Congress that has the power to make and modify laws, not the President of the United States. So it's not surprising that the courts again blocked his illegal executive orders and if they try to issue additional ones, including restricting vote-by-mail, I believe it'll meet the same fate.

• On Monday, we heard that [DOJ plans] to use state voter data to conduct list maintenance at the federal level. Secretaries, Republican and Democratic Secretaries, how does that make you feel about what they think about your integrity and your professionalism and those of your offices and your staff and your teams? Not trying to be partisan here, just trying to call balls and strikes.

• We've seen public calls for prosecutions against elected officials. We've seen Oval Office shakedowns. We've seen threats to withhold funding from certain states when state leaders don't do what President Trump wants them to do. We've seen litmus tests for federal jobs, again, the people who are supposed to be partners with us in protecting our democracy.

• Don't get me started on how they've chosen to go about immigration enforcement across the country, but to me, it's pretty telling. Is it really about public safety in Minnesota, or is it about trying to get the voter data that they've been desperately trying to get for almost eight years now? That's the environment that we're living in and working in. The whole country sees it for what it is, I know I see it for what it is, and Congress will continue to assert its role in all of this.

• I know we will have and you will deliver free and fair elections this November, and in primaries between now and then and for years to come, because of your hard work, your integrity, your commitment, and that of your teams.

• When it comes to campaigns, it's okay to put on blue jerseys or red jerseys, but when it comes to government, when it comes to the public service we're sworn to do, it's not about Republican or Democrat. It's about democracy. It is about security. It is about integrity.

• Secretaries of State, I encourage you to continue defending your roles, your authority, and your voters, because we're all counting on you, and in the face of all this, … your work has never been more critical, and I want to be your partner in continuing to deliver for the people of your respective states and our nation.

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