Earlier in Maggie Toulouse Oliver’s career, election administration was a quiet affair.

“We used to say, ‘If we’re in the news, we’re not doing a good job,’” she said Wednesday at a House Administration Committee hearing. 

But that’s changed drastically of late. “More people are now aware of elections, and more awareness can bring more participation, understanding and innovation,” said Toulouse Oliver, who is now New Mexico’s secretary of state. “However, because of what has now been years of false election claims and ideological attempts to discredit our voting systems and processes, much of the heightened awareness of elections is now colored by conspiracies, misinformation and, frankly, outright lies.”

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said election misinformation had led people to her doorstep, where they hurled insults and threats through a megaphone while she hung Christmas decorations with her 4-year-old son. 

A trend of harassment aimed at election workers is one of the gravest threats to American elections today, argued Toulouse Oliver, Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, in an unusually contentious meeting of the committee about the challenges election administrators are facing ahead of November’s election.

“We need to strengthen Americans’ confidence in our elections. I think there are more commonsense reforms that can be done to make sure Americans have that,” said the committee’s chairman, Bryan Steil, R-Wis., before peppering the Democratic secretaries of state with questions gauging their support for voter identification laws and urging the removal of noncitizens from voter rolls. 

Both issues have come up repeatedly in House Administration hearings this Congress. They’ve become a focal point for congressional Republicans since 2020, when Donald Trump refused to concede the presidential election, falsely claiming it’d been stolen. The former president has repeated claims about “cheating and skullduggery” in recent days, threatening in a social media post to prosecute “to the fullest extent of the law” election officials and a slew of other perceived opponents over any “unscrupulous behavior.”

Steil also used Wednesday’s hearing to further his probe of a 2021 executive order. Issued by President Joe Biden, the order urges executive branch agencies to partner with local officials on voter registration efforts targeting historically marginalized groups. 

He subpoenaed 15 Biden Cabinet officials for their strategic plans relating to the executive order but said last week he has not received the information. It led to a tense exchange with Benson over a memorandum of understanding Michigan entered into with the Small Business Administration relating to the executive order. 

“Did you see the strategic plan?” Steil repeatedly asked Benson, cutting her off several times as she attempted to answer. 

“I’m really not sure why you’re barraging me with these questions,” Benson said, after saying she hadn’t seen the document.

“These agencies are using our taxpayer dollars to put forward a partisan get-out-the-vote effort and they won’t provide a strategic plan,” said Steil, who argues the executive order could lead to violations of a federal law that prohibits executive branch employees from engaging in certain political activities. 

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, also a witness at Wednesday’s hearing, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Biden executive order.

It was one of several testy back-and-forths between witnesses and members. At one point, ranking member Joseph D. Morelle, D-N.Y., urged his colleagues to be “mindful of decorum.” 

West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, meanwhile, took aim at a group of former intelligence officials who sent a letter ahead of the 2020 election that suggested Russian operatives could be behind revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He called the letter “the worst election interference in American history.” 

Noncitizen voting debate

And LaRose and Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd raised the specter of noncitizens voting, which is currently illegal. LaRose said he’d found nearly 600 noncitizens on Ohio voter rolls in the last year. There were nearly 8 million registered voters in Ohio as of November 2023. “The fact is, it’s rare. But we keep it rare by enforcing the law,” LaRose said.

Byrd cited narrow margins in federal elections — like the 2000 presidential contest, in which George W. Bush squeaked through in Florida by less than a thousand votes — as a reason for a “zero tolerance policy” when it comes to noncitizen voting. 

“Small numbers matter in elections,” Byrd said. 

Toulouse Oliver and the other Democratic witnesses agreed there should be zero tolerance. But she said alarmist rhetoric around noncitizen voting is one of the fictitious talking points that’s eroded the public’s trust in elections.

“Noncitizen voting does not happen in any systemic way in New Mexico or in the nation more broadly,” she said, citing data from the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Nevertheless, Republicans have pressed the issue.

A bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections advanced out of the House Administration Committee earlier this year and passed on the House floor in July with the support of several Democrats.

Speaker Mike Johnson attempted to include that measure, which is backed by Trump, in a stopgap spending bill to keep the government funded through the beginning of 2025. Johnson pulled the package from the floor Wednesday ahead of a planned vote.

Such proposals, Democrats argued, can do more harm than good.

In Arizona, Fontes said, a 2004 ballot initiative known as Proposition 200 established strict standards to verify the citizenship of people trying to register to vote and, in the process, disenfranchised potential voters. When he took office in 2023, Fontes said he found 47,000 eligible American citizens who were denied the right to vote because of that law.

“We have denied eligible citizens the right to vote in far greater numbers than we would have prevented the vanishingly rare noncitizen voting that is alleged to be happening across the United States of America,” Fontes said.