60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl Fearmongers Over Midterms, Calls Non-Citizens Voting 'Tiny' Issue

Nicholas Spinnato
October 19th, 2026 12:14 PM

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In another Sunday of CBS’s 60 Minutes being anything but “MAGA-coded,” longtime correspondent Lesley Stahl fearmongered over the 2026 midterm elections and minimized investigations into non-citizens voting in another Trump-bashing story on the supposedly "revamped" weekend magazine show.

Stahl’s introduction to the lead story began with fear, as she said, “The midterms are just two weeks away, and President Trump is using his power to intimidate the people who run our elections, putting the voting system under remarkable stress.”

She connected liberal midterm fears to investigations into non-citizens voting, and stated, “The latest move came on Friday when the Justice Department threatened to prosecute California election officials if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from 20,000 people the Trump administration says are likely noncitizens."

 

 

Stahl continued and claimed it was the “latest in a sequence of actions that has bred an erosion of faith in the integrity of our elections.”

As part of her story, Stahl profiled two officials as heroes amid election probes. First, she profiled Democrat Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett after an FBI raid in Fulton County. Barrett called the raid “political theater aimed at undermining the 2026 and midterm elections.”

Stahl also profiled Utah Republican Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson, who had not allowed the Trump administration to inspect the state’s voter rolls for non-citizens voting. On the issue of non-citizens on voter rolls, Henderson said, “Across the board, nobody I know wants anyone who isn't eligible to be able to vote.”

Later, Stahl began her complete minimization of non-citizens voting, with a brief admission: “State audits have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, though it does happen.”

After more praise for Henderson, Stahl turned to try to pin Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon on noncitizen voting in a loaded question: 

 

 

There are people who feel that the point is to sow distrust about the whole election system. There are very few people who are noncitizens who end up voting. Very, very few. And so, therefore, what's the purpose?

Dhillon responded, “The point is actually the opposite of what you were saying. It's not to sow distrust. The distrust is there. And so all of these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time really in volume. And look, even the Biden administration prosecuted 13 people for noncitizen voting”

Stahl interrupted, “I mean, the numbers are tiny,” before Dhillon responded, slowing down her answer for Stahl to understand, and said, “So, Lesley, we've been in office for less than two years. We've had investigations ongoing for over a year, and it takes time. There are literally thousands of them out there that we are looking at.”

Notably, on Monday, after the story aired, the “tiny” issue happened again, as the DOJ charged “more than two dozen foreign nationals” in California for voting as non-citizens, according to the New York Post. Earlier this year, the State of New Jersey also removed thousands of noncitizens from its voter rolls.

Still, Stahl opined, “The pile up of investigations, charges of voting hanky-panky, have caused voters to lose faith in our election system.”

 

 

But Stahl also mentioned, “Democrats have cast doubt on our elections too,” and said, “But it's a question of degree” compared to Trump. Stahl then turned back to Dhillon and asked, “Is the administration planning to send ICE agents out to the polling places?”

Dhillon answered no, and Stahl then stated the Assistant AG also “called the notion that President Trump might challenge the results of the midterms paranoia.”

After Dhillon added that if a noncitizen was found to have voted in a midterm election, their vote would be challenged, not the entire state. Nevertheless, Stahl pushed for more to calm liberal election fears: (Click “expand”)

STAHL: What I'm hearing you say is that you think it's very unlikely that a vote, a state vote, will be challenged. But people worry about that. Can you -

DHILLON: Well, I don't know what is going to happen, but I can tell you that absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states.

After the interview aired, Dhillon noted there were edits to her full interview with Stahl, and posted, “I set some fake news straight on @60Minutes tonight, though as usual they edit out 95% of the answers.”

 

 

So far in the newest season of 60 Minutes, each episode has featured a story with an anti-Trump or anti-Republican framing, as well as an anti-Israel story that Stahl apparently threatened to quit over if it was not aired, disproving those who feared CBS and 60 Minutes were turning into MAGA TV and proving it was the same old 60 Minutes.

The transcript is below. Click "expand":

CBS’s 60 Minutes

October 18, 2026

7:44:12 PM Eastern

LESLEY STAHL: The midterms are just two weeks away and President Trump is using his power to intimidate the people who run our elections, putting the voting system under remarkable stress.

The latest move came on Friday when the Justice Department threatened to prosecute California election officials if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from 20,000 people the Trump administration says are "likely noncitizens." It's the latest in a sequence of actions that has bred an erosion of faith in the integrity of our elections.

Our story focuses on how state and local election officials are being pressured - in a way that is stoking that distrust. We start with what happened in Georgia this past January.

[Story begins]

What you're seeing is extraordinary: armed federal agents seizing ballots from a local election facility.

FULTON COUNTY COMMISSIONER DANA BARRETT (D): In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI.

STAHL: Fulton County Commissioner Democrat Dana Barrett got a text message that sent her racing to this warehouse near Atlanta.

[To Barrett] Were the FBI agents inside by the time you got here?

BARRETT: They were. They had vests. They had guns. They had all of the equipment on their belts as if they were raiding a drug house.

STAHL: There were dozens of agents who gained entry to the warehouse with a criminal search warrant that allowed them to seize ballots and other election materials from the 2020 election.

[To Barrett] Is there any way that you could have said no?

BARRETT: No. They had a valid warrant signed by a judge. We did not have a choice. 

STAHL: The agents worked all day packing up more than 600 boxes of election records. After night fell and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard 

[To Barrett] Where are the ballots now?

BARRETT: We have no idea.

STAHL: You don't know where they took them?

BARRETT: Nope.

STAHL: Do you know what they were going for?

BARRETT: Look, it was in my opinion political theater aimed at undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections.

STAHL: You think it was an intimidation for the next election?

BARRETT: I think it was all part of this concerted effort that's happening nationwide to undermine faith in elections. 

STAHL: We obtained this internal FBI email temporarily reassigning "260" analysts to work on a "priority investigation" into the Georgia materials. That was three months ago... and nothing has come of it yet. There have been dozens of probes into the 2020 election in Georgia and none have moved the needle.

BARRETT: You take a fraudulent claim. You investigate it at the state level. Then the federal level refers to what the state did. And people just see all of these investigations and FBI raids and subpoenas and they say, "Something must be wrong there. Why should I believe the results?"

STAHL: The Trump administration has cast more doubt about the reliability of our elections by investigating voting machines and actual ballots, which the Justice Department has attempted in several states.

The lieutenant governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, told us it's a kind of interference she's never seen before.

UTAH LT. GOV DEIDRE HENDERSON (R): In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external. Non-state actors, cybersecurity threats and other things. But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.

STAHL: Your federal government.

HENDERSON: That's right.

STAHL: Henderson is responsible for Utah's elections: everything from voter registration to counting the ballots on Election Day. Keep in mind Henderson is a Republican in a deeply red state. President Trump won the last election here by more than 20 points.

Last year the Justice Department zoned in on Henderson, and her counterparts in states across the country, demanding their "statewide voter registration list," which includes voters' confidential personal information. Henderson had never seen anything like it. She said no.

HENDERSON: They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: Social Security numbers, full dates of birth, driver's license numbers.

STAHL: Why? Why did they want that?

HENDERSON: We just weren't given very good answers and we were concerned about what they would do with that data.

STAHL: Officials in 29 other states – Democrat and Republican - felt the same and so they also refused to comply. The Justice Department has sued all of them, saying it needs access to voter rolls to help ensure that immigrants who are not entitled to vote don't.

[To Henderson] They think that you're allowing ineligible voters to go and vote, and they feel it's a federal obligation to stop that. Why is that wrong?

HENDERSON: Across the board, nobody I know wants anyone who isn't eligible to be able to vote.

STAHL: State audits have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, though it does happen. In Utah, Henderson found only 52 who were questionable out of more than 2 million voters.

[To Henderson] We did a calculation that that's two thousandths of one percent.

HENDERSON: Yeah.

STAHL: So, has it ever been an issue in Utah?

HENDERSON: No.

STAHL: Henderson has been notified that if she knowingly allows any noncitizens to vote in Utah she could be prosecuted, and even sent to prison.

In July, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin spelled it out:

DHS SEC. MARKWAYNE MULLIN [from July]: Those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even depending on how far it goes, prison time.

STAHL: Election officials in California have been put on notice, too. The Justice Department has threatened to prosecute them for essentially the same crime: And President Trump put out a social media post Friday about California: "They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!"

STAHL: You could go to prison.

HENDERSON: We're not going to prison. No. It's silly.

STAHL: You're absolutely sure?

HENDERSON: Well.

STAHL: She's right to say "well." The Justice Department told Henderson last month she is officially "under investigation."

[To Henderson] You are toe-to-toe with the president of the United States. It's a big thing that you're doing.

HENDERSON: I'm just doing my job.

STAHL: Standing up to the federal government that's threatening you with jail time, it's bold at-- the very least.

HENDERSON: I have to-- I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, if-- as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right. I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guard rails, holding the line. Someone has to.

STAHL: Other Republicans, like Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, also pushed back when election monitors from the Justice Department in August demanded access to his voting machines.

GOV. MARK GORDON (R-WY): I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns. I don't like that. And I don't like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either.

STAHL Things escalated when President Trump defied history and the Constitution with a shocking statement on a podcast.

PRESIDENT TRUMP [On The Dan Bongino Show]: The Republicans should say, 'We wanna take over. We should take over the voting.' The voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. 

STAHL: In America elections are local. They're run by towns and counties and states. It's all in Article 1 of the Constitution. Congress makes laws regulating elections…

But the president doesn't have a role in running them. That hasn't stopped Mr. Trump from signing two executive orders trying to create new federal voting rules.

ASST. AG FOR CIVIL RIGHTS HARMEET DHILLON: Noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections, so the question is simply how many of them there are.

STAHL: Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, has spearheaded the government's voter roll initiative. She spoke to us from California.

[To Dhillon] There are people who feel that the point is to sow distrust about the whole election system. There are very few people who are noncitizens who end up voting. Very, very few. And so therefore what's the purpose?

DHILLON: The point is actually the opposite of what you were saying. It's not to sow distrust. The distrust is there. And so all of these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time really in volume. And look, even the Biden administration prosecuted 13 people for noncitizen voting --

STAHL: 13 people. I mean, the numbers are tiny.

DHILLON: So Lesley, we've been in office for less than two years. We've had investigations ongoing for over a year,and it takes time. There are literally thousands of them out there that we are looking at.

STAHL: The pile up of investigations, charges of voting hanky-panky, have caused voters to lose faith in our election system.

PRESIDENT OBAMA [At Rally]: They try to rig elections!

STAHL: Democrats have cast doubt on our elections too.

REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY): We will not let their scheme to rig the midterm election and beyond be successful.

STAHL: But it's a question of degree.

In the 21 months of President Trump's second term, he has said, in so many words, the vote can't be trusted -- more than 150 times.

The president is only turning up the volume. Listen to him at the Republican Midterm Convention last month asking his supporters to make a promise.

PRESIDENT TRUMP [At RNC Midterm Convention]: That I will go out with my family, my friends. I'll do it any way. I don't care if I'm registered or not. I'm going to try and cheat like hell like they do.

STAHL: One argument is that when the president of the United States keeps saying that the system is rigged, people lose confidence. You don't think it's rigged, do you?

DHILLON: In terms of rigged, I definitely think that there were irregularities in prior elections. But I think people are more sensitive to it now.

STAHL:Is the administration planning to send ICE agents out to the polling places?

DHILLON: There is no plan to do that.

STAHL: Dhillon dismissed that concern and called the notion that President Trump might challenge the results of the midterms "paranoia."

[To Dhillon] So would you consider a noncitizen voting an irregularity that would lead to a challenge of the vote?

DHILLON: I think that would lead to the person's vote being challenged, but not the entire election. 

STAHL: What I'm hearing you say is that you think it's very unlikely that a vote, a state vote, will be challenged. But people worry about that. Can you -

DHILLON: Well, I don't know what is going to happen, but I can tell you that absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states.

STAHL: With just 16 days til the election, polls are showing that only half of Americans expect the midterms to be "free and fair." 

[To Henderson] We have swing states where elections are almost always really razor-thin close. What about Wisconsin? What about Georgia? Can they have honest, fair elections?

HENDERSON: They can have honest and fair elections. Whether or not the losing candidates accept those results is the question. And we are seeing a trend of candidates who lose races now refusing to concede saying it was rigged, saying it wasn't fair, even when it isn't close. Candidates who lose can do so much good by graciously conceding. That will instill confidence in the public.

(...)

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