The US homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, on Tuesday said that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers could be deployed to polling sites across the country.

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For months, Democrats and voting rights groups have warned that the Trump administration might attempt to deploy federal agents to polling locations in an effort to intimidate voters and depress turnout ahead of the November midterm elections.

Although the White House has downplayed such suggestions, Donald Trump has declined to rule it out while continuing to sow doubt about the integrity of past – and future – US elections.

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Federal law prohibits military personnel or other “armed” agents from being “at any place where a general or special election is held”.

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Mullin’s latest comments follow statements he made in July, when he threatened to withhold federal aid from states that refused to comply with homeland security election directives as part of the administration’s crackdown on what it alleges is widespread voter fraud.

“We will scrub all election records, looking for illegal aliens and those who are ineligible to vote, including those that somehow voted, yet they were deceased,” Mullin said earlier this summer, adding: “If states want the grant funding, to recap, they must secure the election.”

Yet experts say the administration has failed to offer any proof for its claims of non-citizen voting. In one instance, the DHS officials claimed that there may have been as many as 16,000 non-citizens registered to vote in Nevada, but later admitted they could confirm that only 185 of those people were actually non-citizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian.