DOJ Threatens Election Officials in All 50 States With Prosecution
Imagine getting a letter from the federal government telling you that you might go to prison for doing your job, and that you have five days to explain how you plan to avoid it. That is roughly what landed on the desks of election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia this week.
The letters came from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, according to The Associated Press, and they carried a blunt warning. Administrators who knowingly let noncitizens stay on the voter rolls or cast ballots could face criminal charges, and they were given five days to report back on how they intend to comply.
On paper, that sounds like a crackdown on a serious problem. The trouble is that the problem barely exists. When the Brennan Center for Justice studied 42 jurisdictions that tabulated 23.5 million votes in 2016, election officials referred an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting, according to the Brennan Center. That works out to 0.0001 percent of the ballots cast. Robert Weiner of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said it plainly, telling the AP the rate of noncitizen voting is “infinitesimally small.”
So why the sudden urgency, four months before an election that could hand Democrats one or both chambers of Congress?
The letters are only part of it. According to the AP, a Federal Emergency Management Agency antiterrorism grant announced in June now comes with strings attached. The program carries more than $1 billion for states, localities and tribal governments, and FEMA expects to award 56 grants. But 20 percent of that money will be withheld until recipients meet a new list of election demands. Those include verifying the citizenship of every registered voter and election worker, auditing results, and ditching voting systems that read bar codes in favor of ballots marked by hand.
Here is the part that should give all of us concern. Even states that might want to cooperate may not be able to. Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project, told the AP that some of these changes are simply impossible this close to the midterms, and that others would require state legislatures to pass entirely new laws. You cannot rebuild the machinery of an election in a few months through executive pressure.
We have already seen how the courts view this campaign. In recent days, judges rejected federal efforts to seize the names of every Georgia election worker from 2020 and to force New Hampshire and Pennsylvania to hand over voter data, according to the AP. All told, the government has now lost more than 10 of these cases involving demands to 30 states and the District of Columbia. Last week, the Supreme Court itself rebuked the president and ruled that states may count mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day.
That losing record matters, because it suggests the goal may not really be winning in court. Weiner offered a darker read, predicting to the AP that the president is trying to manufacture chaos and then use it to justify drastic steps in states that oppose him, up to refusing to accept their results.
We should take that possibility seriously without panicking about it. The safeguards are holding. Judges keep saying no. State officials from both parties are on the record. But safeguards hold only as long as we pay attention to them.
So pay attention. Ask your secretary of state where they stand. Watch whether that FEMA money actually gets held hostage. An election belongs to the people who vote in it, not to whoever can send the scariest letter. Let us keep it that way. Go beyond the headlines…
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