By Jasper Ward
WASHINGTON, July 10 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on Friday that states must adopt "common-sense election security measures" to receive certain funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
To qualify for three grant programs related to preparing for terrorist attacks and other threats, states must use a federal system for verifying voters' citizenship and accept hand-marked paper ballots in elections, the DHS said. FEMA will withhold 20% of a grant recipient's
total award until the state shows it has complied, the department said.
"These new requirements for homeland security grant recipients will preserve election integrity and ensure that Americans can trust the results," Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement.
The grant programs, totaling about $1.1 billion, have existed for years. None of them were designed with election security specifically in mind.
States will be required to use the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system to verify the citizenship status of everyone listed in the state voter registration database within 120 days of accepting a federal grant award, the DHS said.
It said states will also be required to submit a plan to move away from electronic voting systems that use bar codes and QR codes to count votes . States will instead have to use equipment that accepts hand-marked paper ballots, it said.
States will also have to manually audit at least 5% of ballots cast and reconcile the number of voters who participated in each federal election with the number of votes.
The announcement comes four months ahead of November's midterm elections.
President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly asserted without proof that there was fraud in the 2020 election won by rival Joe Biden, has taken other election-related steps in recent days.
On Thursday, Trump fired the last three members of the Election Assistance Commission, the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide.
The U.S. Department of Justice sent letters to all 50 states earlier this week warning that election officials could face criminal charges for allowing noncitizens to remain on their lists of eligible voters.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward in Washington; Additional reporting by Costas Pitas; Editing by Daphne Psaledakis, Sergio Non and Tom Hogue)
