A fraudulent approach to a nonexistent problem
He reassigned the Director of National Intelligence—statutorily funded to guard Americans from foreign threats—to oversee the seizure of Americans’ confidential voter data in Georgia.
He issued an executive
order, laughable for its breadth, mandating new voter registration and
rules nationwide. He is urging Republicans to both gerrymander and “nationalize”
federal elections, with growing threats to surround polling
places with armed ICE goons. After ICE killed two protesters in
Minnesota, he tried to leverage
the violence to get his hands on the state’s voter rolls (Nice state
you got there).
Where brute force and intimidation won’t work, Trump is
pushing the Department of Justice to fight
for confidential voter data through the courts.
It’s not going so well.
Trump is reassembling his stolen election chorus
In
multiple pending lawsuits, the Trump administration argues that it is
entitled to access voters’ confidential information to “prevent the inclusion
of ineligible voters” on the states’ voting rolls. Using the ruse of a “stolen”
2020 election, the regime claims this litigation is designed to prevent “voter fraud”
in upcoming elections.
The legal problem for Trump is that more than 60 judges in state and federal court, including judges appointed by Trump, have already examined all his theories and evidence and ruled that there was no voter fraud. Contrary to Trump’s obsession, it’s already illegal and extremely rare for noncitizens to vote.
The Brennan Center for Justice reported just 30 incidents nationwide of suspected noncitizen voting in 2016, or 0.0001% of votes cast.
That’s a formidable wall of evidence for Trump lawyers who
value their law licenses to misrepresent in federal court.
Trump’s DOJ wants voters’ social security numbers
The
Constitution says that states—not the federal government— are
responsible for “the times, places and manner of holding elections.” Although
Congress has limited power to make some rules, a president has no
constitutional authority whatsoever over federal elections because the drafters
knew a corrupt figure like Trump would eventually come along. They knew a
charlatan president, if given any role at all, would abuse it to manipulate the
process to stay in power.
Last summer, despite the glaring unconstitutionality of the
move, Trump’s DOJ started
requesting complete, unredacted voter files from every state. Trump’s
AG asserts
her own statutory duty “to ensure States conduct voter registration
list maintenance to prevent the inclusion of ineligible voters of any type on
any state’s voter registration list.”
The DOJ is suing the 20 states that told Trump to shove it.
Another Trump judge smacks him down
On Tuesday, in a 23-page
opinion, another federal judge appointed by Trump told Trump’s DOJ lawyers
to peddle their nonsense elsewhere.
Judge Jarbou of the Western District of Michigan ruled that
the state of Michigan was legally entitled to refuse Trump’s request for
confidential voter data, including social security numbers, addresses, and
drivers license information, and dismissed the
Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking that data.
The AG’s complaint in Michigan was carefully drafted to
avoid any inference of partisan motive and instead focused on “data integrity.”
In it, Bondi
whined that states “submit dates of birth, driver’s license/ID card
numbers, and Social Security numbers to ERIC, a voluntary democratic voter
organization data base,” yet these same states refuse to give those same data
to the federal government.
Bondi wonders why. She pleads, “Michigan provides the
identical information that the Department has requested to ERIC… which lacks
any enforcement authority, yet refuses to adhere to federal law and provide
that same information to the Attorney General of the United States.”
Why? Let’s let a federal judge in Oregon answer that
question.
An Oregon judge calls out Trump’s strongarm tactics
In response to the Trump administration’s demand for
confidential voter information in Oregon, last week another judge, Judge
Mustafa Kasubhai, said that the Trump administration, through its public
statements and actions by the Justice Department, had forfeited any right to be
trusted by the courts.
Kasubhai said that
the presumption that the DOJ “could be taken at its word — with little
doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.” Kasubhai
focused on the letter Bondi sent to Gov. Walz of Minnesota after federal agents
killed two citizens there in January. Projecting Trump’s mob-boss mentality,
Bondi said Walz could take “three simple steps” to restore order and stop
federal agents’ violence in his state; one step was handing over Minnesota’s
voter rolls.
Clearly disgusted by the protection racket, Kasubhai
added that when the department claims it will protect and not misuse
Americans’ private data, it’s words “must be thoroughly scrutinized and squared
with (the DOJ’s) open and public statements to the contrary.”
Let me in! Cried the wolf
The DOJ’s complaint seeking voter rolls admits that,
“Historically, elections in this country have been administered at the state
and local level,” but adds that “the federal government can play a valuable
[role] by assisting state and local government in modernizing their election
systems.”
That explains it: Trump and Bondi are assisting us.
They don’t want voters’ confidential data to feed
Palantir’s ravenous national database; they don’t want the data to
systemically harm those who don’t support them. They only want to modernize Democrats’
voter rolls to help them purge voters before November. How
magnanimous.
They must think judges are idiots.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial
attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A
defense. Her Substack, The
Haake Take, is free.
