On Thursday evening, around the same time the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors in order to bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sued six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—for failing to hand over their full, unredacted voter registration lists. The new legal actions signify a ramping up of the Trump administration’s voter-suppression agenda in the wake of similar lawsuits the department filed last week against Maine and Oregon.
Explanation in article:
In particular, the DOJ appears eager to share state voter data with the Department of Homeland Security, in order to comb through federal immigration databases to search for cases of ineligible voting or noncitizens on the voter rolls. Such databases are not designed for those purposes and will likely produce inaccurate results, especially because such fraud is also exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, this will give them an opportunity to trumpet fake claims of fraud in order to advance Trump’s lies about the voting process.
“My guess is they want the voter files to be able to say we have the voter files and we know there are x or y fraudulent people on it,” says Justin Levitt, who served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama. “It will be fiction, but now they’ll say it because they have them. Even if they find an infinitesimal number of wrong people on the rolls, they will lie about the numbers. This administration cannot be trusted. They have an enormous problem with credibility and an even bigger problem with data.”