BREAKING: DHS to withold grant funding if states do not comply with election integrity SAVE program

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said that states have to cooperate with the SAVE election integrity program at DHS or else they will lose grant funding. The SAVE program is where states partner with DHS to scrub their voter rolls and further enhance election security. 

President Donald Trump said during his Thursday speech on election integrity that he "ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately." He also talked about the need to have more security on our voting machines.

During Friday's press conference, Mullin said that the scrubbing of voter rolls and other security enhancements for voter security in the SAVE program would become mandatory for states to get grant funding from DHS.

"Working with Secretary Lutnick, we are going to make our security enhancements mandatory, meaning that if these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to work or to run federal elections, they're going to have to implement security issues. Just security issues. We're not trying to get into anything else, but we're saying that the machines have to be secured, and that your voter restoration list needs to be scrubbed. We need to make sure that individuals that are legally able to vote are voting," Mullin said. 

Ahead of and during the conference Mullin said that in just the four states of California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, there are 250,000 noncitizens that are registered to vote.

"Election security is national security,” said DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a post to X. “As President Trump announced last night, DHS has identified over 250,000 potential noncitizens illegally registered to vote in just 4 U.S. states. Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”

Trump's Thursday speech was also not aired by multiple large news broadcasters, which Mullin pushed back on during the press conference.  

"The major networks not willing to carry the President of the United State's address to the nation on election security, how shameful is that?" He added that Trump was not trying to rehash the 2020 election, but that he was pointing out election security concerns with China as well as other points. "The president was giving facts," Mullin reiterated multiple times.