Department of Justice Shifts Emphasis towards Elections, Prioritizing Trump's Election Decree According to Internal Document
BELLA LANGRevamped mission for Justice Department's voting rights squad: Investigating voter fraud and ensuring elections remain "suspicion-free"
In an about-face from its original purpose, the Justice Department division responsible for ensuring compliance with voting rights laws will now prioritize hunting down voter fraud and scrubbing elections of any whiff of impropriety, according to a confidential memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The revised mission statement for the voting section bobs briefly to the surface of the Voting Rights Act, but it omits mentioning the usual enforcement methods, such as safeguarding citizens' ballot casting rights and preventing electoral district lines from being carved up along racial lines. Instead, it refocuses the unit on chasing down conspiracy theories about voter fraud that gained momentum during former Republican President Donald Trump's election loss in 2020.
Trump's then-Attorney General, William Barr, had repeatedly stated that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election. Repeated recounts and audits in battleground states that Trump contested his loss, including audits led by Republicans, reaffirmed Biden's victory and found that the election was conducted properly. Trump and his supporters also lost over 60 court cases trying to overturn the election results.
In contrast, the current Attorney General is Pam Bondi, who supported Trump's attempts to overturn his 2020 loss. The president has appointed Harmeet Dhillon, a long-time Republican Party lawyer and Trump ally who has echoed some of the former president's baseless voting claims, to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, where the voting section resides.
Stacey Young, an 18-year Justice Department veteran who left the division shortly after Trump took office and founded Justice Connection, an organization supporting the agency's employees, said, "The division’s job is not to promote the politically expedient fiction that voting fraud is widespread."
The department did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump has previously demonstrated his penchant for using the Justice Department to take aim at those who defended the 2020 election by directing the department to investigate one of his former appointees who publicly vouched for the accuracy of the 2020 vote count.
"The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion," the new mission statement proclaims. It also vows to "vigorously enforce" Trump's executive order aiming to reshape the election process. Parts of the order have been blocked by a judge.
The executive order, signed late last month, demands people provide proof of U.S. citizenship each time they register to vote, requires all mail ballots to be received by Election Day (which counteracts the law in 18 states), and instructs an independent federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission, to revise its guidelines for voting machines.
Legal analysts argue that much of the order is unconstitutional because only states and Congress, not the president, have the authority to determine election procedures.
The new mission statement for the Civil Rights Division also pledges to concentrate on guaranteeing that "only American citizens vote in U.S. federal elections." However, it's already illegal for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections. People have to affirm their U.S. citizenship when they register, and attempting to vote as a noncitizen can result in felony charges and deportation.
Surveys have revealed only a handful of noncitizens casting ballots, usually accidentally, among the hundreds of millions of votes cast in recent elections. A proof-of-citizenship requirement in Kansas over a decade ago barred around 31,000 eligible U.S. citizens from registering to vote before the courts intervened.
Republicans, including Trump, continue to insist that there must be a larger number of noncitizens voting and are pushing for stricter voting laws to keep them out.
Notably, the new mission statement mentions investigating "fraud" twice, as well as unspecified forms of malfeasance. While the Department of Justice has been investigating and prosecuting voting fraud in a separate criminal division, the voting section is a civil unit that does not conduct criminal investigations.
Now, however, it will "protect the right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated," according to the statement. It remains unclear what this refers to since there have been no widespread instances of votes being improperly tabulated.
Justin Levitt, who served as President Joe Biden's senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights, noted that because the voting rights section does not file criminal charges, its power is constrained by the specifics of civil rights laws and what judges will approve.
"For the civil section of the Civil Rights Division, courts need to be buying what they're selling,” he said.
In light of the revised mission statement, could a potential focus of Seattle's politics and policy-and-legislation discussions involve scrutinizing the Justice Department's new emphasis on investigating voter fraud in elections, especially since the voting section, a civil unit, traditionally does not conduct criminal investigations? General news headlines might also cover the impact of the Department of Justice's new direction on Seattle's crime rates and voting patterns, especially considering the controversy surrounding the institution's shift from its original mandate to safeguard citizens' ballot casting rights.
