Federal officials charged a Utah letter carrier Tuesday with throwing 300 primary ballots in a church parking lot dumpster, an incident that a top U.S. Justice Department official said made the case for stricter regulations of voting.

The prosecution of Damon Matai Seei, of Payson, Utah, showed “voting fraud is real,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a press conference at DOJ headquarters in Washington.

The Justice Department gave the arrest an unusually high profile, spotlighting the administration’s efforts to combat voter fraud after the U.S. Supreme Court this month blocked a new U.S. Postal Service rule limiting mail voting from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The regulation was meant to “address the chronically abused mail-in ballot system,” McCotter said. He criticized the trial judge who initially blocked the rule, which would have required special tracking and design features, among other things such as creating a national database of eligible voters.

“Election integrity should not be a political or partisan issue,” McCotter said. “Who could be against properly tracking mail-in ballots? Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, that regulation was blocked by a judge in Massachusetts. … The Trump administration, however, will continue taking aggressive actions to protect our elections.”

Postal Service rule

U.S. District Judge Indiria Talwani’s order blocking the rule is only in effect for the Nov. 3 elections, a provision meant to preserve the status quo because the rule was finalized mere months before the midterms. The merits of the case are still being argued. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Talwani’s decision.

The prosecution of Seei, and the attention the administration sought to give it, undercut a key argument the administration made in the case: The rule included only “modest” technical specifications for a category of mail and should not be interpreted as an election regulation.

The U.S. Constitution grants states the authority to administer elections, with policy oversight from Congress. 

In siding with the Democratic states and voting rights groups who filed suit, Talwani and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit said the rule was clearly an attempt to affect election policy and was not restricted to a modest mail regulation.

Trump and mail-in voting

President Donald Trump has railed against mail-in voting and claimed, without evidence, that it is a major source of election fraud and contributed to his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.

Since Trump retook office in January 2025, the department has charged 70 immigrants with illegally voting, compared with only 13 in the four years of Biden’s term, McCotter said Tuesday.

“And we intend to bring many more,” he added.

Homeland Security Investigations, a Homeland Security Department agency, has made 160 recent arrests, from 1,600 open voter fraud cases, HSI acting Deputy Executive Associate Director Matthew Millhollin said.

A reporter in the room noted that 70 prosecutions amounted to a bare fraction of the 150 million votes cast in the 2024 election.

McCotter responded that the Utah case involved 300 ballots, and that law enforcement had only scratched the surface of possible incidents. “Thousands more” cases were being investigated, he said.

“The folks on the other side, the opponents of the president, insist this has never happened, that there is no voting fraud,” he said. “And so when we have dozens of cases … I think that discourages and defeats their characterization.”

No partisan motive alleged

Seei, who is no longer a postal worker, intentionally threw out about 300 mail ballots on June 3 that were being mailed to voters in advance of the June 23 primary in Utah, according to charging documents.

In an interview with law enforcement, he indicated he did not have a political motive but said he threw away the mail, which also included advertisements, “because he wanted to ‘lighten his workload’ so he could presumably go home earlier,” prosecutors said.

Melissa Holyoak, the top federal prosecutor for Utah, traveled to Washington, D.C., for Tuesday’s press conference. She noted that 95% of the state’s voters cast their ballots by mail.

Many people in Seei’s delivery area in Eagle Mountain, Utah, complained to the Utah County Clerk that they hadn’t received ballots, Holyoak said. Using county databases, the clerk found that voter participation was “remarkably low” in the area where complaints originated.

“As American citizens, we have certain freedoms and rights,” Holyoak said. “And one of those fundamental rights is the right to vote. But when defendant allegedly tossed the mail-in ballots into a parking lot dumpster, those citizens’ right to vote were also thrown away.”

The federal public defender representing Seei did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security officers may have broken state laws carrying out the Trump administration’s orders to find noncitizens voting illegally in federal elections, Democratic senators alleged Monday following a whistleblower complaint.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the whistleblower detailed the department’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” in which U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services immigration officers combed through state voter rolls, sometimes pretending to be the voter to access records. 

U.S. citizens were also swept up in the efforts due to faulty data and pressure from top officials to meet a quota of five investigations per hour, or 12 minutes per inquiry, according to the whistleblower’s account. 

“We just got more proof of (President Donald) Trump’s vile schemes to rig our elections,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat. “A DHS whistleblower warns that the department is pulling hundreds, hundreds of federal agents from national security roles, and sending them on a wild goose chase. The goal: to try and prove Trump’s sad, tired and long debunked election conspiracy theories.”

The New York Times was the first to report the existence of the DHS operation.

California Sen. Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration that oversees federal elections, said the president “will go to extraordinary lengths to try to interfere with the midterm elections.”

Padilla said the whistleblower came forward last week.  

Padilla and Schumer called for DHS to shut down the operation. The department did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

“Donald Trump knows his record has been so bad,” Padilla said. “His only chance at keeping Republican majorities in Congress is to interfere with the elections.”

Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, and cases are extremely rare. Some localities have passed laws to allow for noncitizen voting in local elections. 

But the topic is a priority for the president, who has directed DHS to investigate voter rolls for illegal voting by noncitizens. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced two noncitizens from Kansas and Louisiana illegally voted in federal elections.

“Voter fraud is already a serious problem, but non-citizens voting is even worse,” Mullin said. “Every time a non-citizen casts a ballot, it steals a vote from an American citizen.”