AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
President Donald Trump continued to try to sow doubt in U.S. election infrastructure in a speech on Thursday night. He also released documents that he says showed the system is at risk.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes, like, levels never thought possible to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.
RASCOE: But he didn't provide any new evidence of fraudulent votes cast in any election. Elections are administered by the states, and the Trump administration has been leaning on state officials to make changes. Joining us now is Gabriel Sterling. He's the director of special projects at the Georgia Secretary of State's office, the office that oversees Georgia's elections. Welcome to the program.
GABRIEL STERLING: Happy to be here (ph), Ayesha.
RASCOE: So President Trump claims there are hundreds of thousands of noncitizens illegally registered to vote. Is that an issue in Georgia?
STERLING: Not particularly, and we had to really put it in context. The four states that was mentioned specifically by DH Secretary Mullin the next day - he got to about 170,000 that they could actually identify, and the 200-plus thousand - those were estimates. So if you go through state by state, one of them is Pennsylvania. It accounts for 0.09%. But what is more important is what wasn't said. Nobody made the claim that these people actually voted. They might have accidentally gotten onto the rolls, but there's no widespread claims of them voting.
RASCOE: And so that is not an issue that you see in your state?
STERLING: We literally have done - we were the first state to do any audits of this. We've gotten better tools and more tools. We've been able to use the SAVE database from the federal government. And we've found hundreds on the rolls, and then handfuls who have cast a vote. And we looked back as far as 1996. That was the first time we found a noncitizen who cast a vote.
RASCOE: OK.
STERLING: And we've had - we found one that did it in the 2026 election so far. It is exceedingly small. But it's important to make sure we try to keep these people off the rolls so that it doesn't undermine confidence. But telling people this in a way that's intended to undermine confidence is the - is a real situation. These are things elections officials and administrators deal with every single day.
RASCOE: Well, the day after the president's speech, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called on states to share voter rolls with a federal database.
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MARKWAYNE MULLIN: We have red states participating with us. We have some red states that aren't. Every state that's not participating with us should be asked a hard question, why not? What are you afraid of?
RASCOE: But Secretary Mullin also threatened fines and penalties and prison time for officials who don't cooperate. So what's your response to that?
STERLING: Well, they got one big problem right now as a federal judge has said, you can't use that database right now for this purpose. There needs to be laws that are changed in order for that to happen, or another court case. You can't just - and the secondary part of this is we are now in Georgia, I think, a little over 80 days away from voting beginning, and election day itself is about a hundred days away. You can't make widespread changes across 50 states and the District of Columbia, in that period of time. People are building ballots. They're getting poll workers. This kind of stress causes a problem for election administrators who should be doing the blocking and tackling of getting elections done. And when they're interfered with this way and stressed out this way, that's when they can make the errors, the basis for fraud claims later.
RASCOE: Well, I mean, when it comes to the influence of the federal government, I guess I want to ask you, like, is the administration potentially infringing on state authority?
STERLING: They're trying to in a - to a degree. I mean, they can ask these things all day long. I mean, that's what federalism is about. But the reality is there used to be more federal tools available to the states. I've talked to people in the elections community and the intelligence community when they closed down CISA, which was one of the coordinating entities under Department of Homeland Security that worked on security for elections. Essentially, there have been no classified briefings given to states at all during the entire second administration.
Used to be they would get, you know, a dozen or so a year saying, this is the threat environment. This is what foreign actors are doing. This is what to look for, and they've get - they've given no support to the states that - like they used to.
RASCOE: Georgia was at the center of President Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He claimed voter fraud. And earlier this year, the FBI raided a Fulton County election office. Do you know what the status of that investigation is?
STERLING: We have heard jack and squat since then. It has been over five months. And the reason is, I think, in large part, there's nothing there to find. This is the most poked, prodded, looked at and reviewed election ever. So I don't think there's anything there to find. We probably won't hear anything.
RASCOE: Well, I mean, President Trump is pushing to pass the SAVE act, which would impose stricter voting eligibility and ID requirements. Do you think that's necessary?
STERLING: Look, I think the idea of having documentary evidence of citizenship is a great public policy goal. You can't do it in 100 days. It would literally - to execute it properly - take multiple years, working with the federal and state government to build out systems, 'cause what you don't want to do is do a situation where you can potentially disenfranchise somebody.
RASCOE: That's Gabriel Sterling with the Georgia Secretary of State's Office. Thank you so much for being with us this morning.
STERLING: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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