Our Elections Shouldn’t Hinge on Markwayne Mullin’s Integrity

Senators Need to Commit to Respecting Election Results, Not Fueling Chaos

A lot is at stake for our elections in the Senate right now. If the Senate confirms President Trump’s nominee, Markwayne Mullin, to succeed Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, it will put an election denier in a key position to influence elections ahead of the 2026 midterms. And if it passes the SAVE America Act, as President Trump is demanding, it will create a recipe for chaos, confusion, and voter suppression.

Despite its horrific record of abuse over the last year, DHS is poised to play a crucial role in determining citizenship status for purposes of our upcoming elections, through its expanded SAVE Program. In the past, the program was a DHS tool used to verify eligibility for government benefits. But in 2025, DHS significantly ramped up the scale of the SAVE Program, and worked with DOGE to incorporate social security administration data into the database—even though experts have noted that the data being used was outdated and unreliable. And despite the many concerns over accuracy, over the last year the administration has been urging states to use it to verify voter eligibility, continually pushing the widely discredited notion that our elections are at risk because of noncitizens voting.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported in February that 27 states have agreed to use the SAVE Program for elections. Yet early results in Texas and Missouri show an alarming number of false positives—people being flagged as noncitizens for potential purging from voter rolls who in fact are citizens and eligible to vote. For example, in just 29 Texas counties, the news outlets reported finding at least 87 false positives. This has already sown chaos, confusion, and a lot of extra work for local election officials in those states, who have had to track down those flagged and figure out what is accurate. “What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Frank Phillips, elections administrator in Denton County, TX, told ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. And of course, it’s frightening for those affected, who have to worry that their names will be handed over to DHS for potential enforcement action—ProPublica has reported that more than 170 US citizens were wrongly detained by ICE last year.

These problems would be exacerbated if the Senate passed the SAVE America Act, which Trump has anxiously been pushing. The bill would require many voters to rush to do a tremendous amount of paperwork simply to exercise their voting rights in the few months left before the midterms. That risks not only suppressing the vote but fueling more chaos and confusion that could lend themselves to false challenges to outcomes. The bill would also create additional pressure on states to use DHS’s unreliable SAVE system and upload their voter data into it.

Mullin—whose confirmation hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, March 18—was among the Republicans in the House who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 elections. And he has amplified President Trump’s false claims of fraud in that election. Putting him at the helm of an agency that is already playing a key role in determining who may or may not vote raises serious concerns about how he would use that power as the midterms approach.

Instead of yielding to Trump’s demands, the Senate should be investigating DHS’s management of the SAVE system and the disturbing numbers of false positives it is yielding. It should also oppose the nomination of an election denier like Mullin to lead the agency.

And every Senator needs to commit, right now, to respecting the integrity of the 2026 midterms, instead of fueling or amplifying false narratives about the legitimacy of our elections.