The Trump administration is waging war on voting rights using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations and an executive order to limit voting by mail, moves mirroring the US president’s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials.
Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the Department of Justice, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
The justice department has also filed lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from 30 states – even though, by law, states control elections – and the FBI has launched investigations into debunked allegations of voting fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin and a few other swing states that Trump lost in 2020.
Trump in late March this year issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed without evidence contribute to fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder.
The administration’s multi-pronged push to change voting rules is under way despite laws that empower states and Congress to set election rules, sparking lawsuits from states and non-partisan voting rights groups. In early April, officials from 23 Democratic states including California and Washington DC filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s executive order to curb voting by mail, arguing that the order was an unconstitutional effort to interfere with states administering their elections.
Former federal officials with voting expertise are sharply critical of the Trump administration’s moves to limit voting rights with phoney charges of voting fraud. “The Department of Justice has no authority to sweep up the voter rolls, which contain private information like driver’s licenses and social security numbers, from every state in the nation,” said Eileen O’Connor, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center who spent eight years in the justice department’s voting section of the civil rights division.
