1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to take immediate, bipartisan action to stop the Department of Homeland Security's unlawful attempt to seize control of state election infrastructure. Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s recent threats to unilaterally withhold federal election security funding and criminally prosecute local election officials are an unprecedented abuse of executive power. This directive forces our local communities to waste taxpayer resources on a problem that does not exist. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s own database identifies fewer than 100 noncitizen voting cases over several decades; the issue is a statistical non-factor. Period. Threatening our hometown election offices over a manufactured crisis is not only reckless, it actively violates the law: - Defying a Federal Court Injunction: A federal judge explicitly ordered DHS not to use the SAVE database to police state voter rolls. Threatening to punish states for refusing to adopt a database that a federal court has legally blocked DHS from using is a direct violation of a binding judicial order. - Violating the Constitution: Under the Elections Clause, the U.S. Constitution gives states—not federal agencies—the primary authority to run their own elections. - Unlawful Funding Conditions: The executive branch does not have the authority to arbitrarily withhold funding already appropriated by Congress to force states into compliance with an unlawful, non-legislated mandate. - Abuse of Prosecutorial Power: DHS has absolutely no legal basis to threaten local clerks with prison time for following state laws and obeying current federal court injunctions. Leaving our local county election offices to fend for themselves against foreign cybersecurity threats by cutting off CISA funding does not protect our democracy—it actively endangers it. I urge you to use Congress’s power of the purse to: 1. Pass binding appropriations riders that forbid DHS from conditioning federal election, cybersecurity, or counterterrorism grants on state participation in the SAVE database. 2. Defund any executive branch effort to criminally investigate or prosecute state and local election administrators for following state laws or federal court injunctions. 3. Conduct rigorous oversight hearings to demand full transparency regarding the administration's legally non-compliant mandates. Please stand up for the Constitution, protect our local elections teams, and defund this dangerous mandate.