Four days after President Donald Trump announced his administration had uncovered "shocking vulnerabilities" in the nation's election infrastructure, the officials who actually run elections in dozens of states gathered in Boston — and largely shrugged off his claims, according to a new report.
The gathering wasn't an emergency response to Trump's warnings, but rather a long-planned professional conference bringing together election administrators from 37 states, and by most accounts, the president's speech barely registered as a topic of conversation, reported CNN.
More than a dozen officials from both parties told CNN that the president's address contained little new evidence, and some Republican officials went further, openly mocking the data the administration released to support its claims of widespread non-citizen voting.
"Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues was filled with 'a lot of laughing emojis, and like, 'You got to be kidding me?' that this was all it was,'" CNN reported.
One GOP official from a state Trump has repeatedly carried, speaking anonymously, said the declassified intelligence reports Trump touted as an "unprecedented" security threat from China and Venezuela weren't new information at all and contained material his office had already reviewed.
Notably, Trump did not mention that those same reports confirmed neither country had actually tampered with U.S. election results.
The skepticism extends beyond the intelligence briefing. The Department of Homeland Security's citizenship database, used to flag supposed non-citizens on voter rolls, has a documented history of overcounting — something DHS itself acknowledges, advising states to independently verify any matches before acting.
North Carolina's elections director said his office won't simply accept the federal government's findings and will conduct its own verification process, a task he admitted likely won't finish before the midterms. In Georgia, officials examined 2,549 flagged registrants and found only about 20 had ever actually voted.
“We all know elections aren’t rigged, but we have to keep our heads down and do our jobs,” said one Republican election official, who requested anonymity to avoid angering the Trump administration.
Despite the doubts, most Republican election officials have avoided criticizing Trump publicly, instead voicing general support for tightening voter rolls while defending their own states' records. Privately, several described a more guarded reality — one official said the approach is to keep their heads down and continue their work, even while personally rejecting the idea that elections are rigged.
That caution comes against a backdrop of pressure from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who has floated fines and even prison time for officials who don't comply with the administration's demands, a threat some officials say they're taking seriously — even as they try to treat it as background noise.
“There is the concern about, ‘Could I be made the example of?’” said Crane, the Republican who runs Colorado’s bipartisan election clerks’ association. “But I think, by and large, it’s become somewhat white noise at this point.”