President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on elections is more than just another overstep of presidential power — it’s an example of the ways in which Trump’s Justice Department has become an extension of the White House and is involving itself in all of the President’s grievances.
“Free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion are fundamental to maintaining our constitutional Republic,” the executive order, issued Tuesday, reads. “The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election.”
The sweeping 12-page order contains a number of provisions, including a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to vote in federal elections as well as a requirement that all ballots be received by Election Day — both of which fall outside of the executive branch’s authority to mandate.
But, there’s also a section, buried deeper in the order, that, if implemented, would give Trump’s Justice Department the authority to pick and choose what states get federal funding for election administration. It would require states to loop the DOJ in on supposed violations of election law that it encounters. But it also mandates that basic information about voter roll maintenance be shared with the DOJ as well.
If states are unwilling to enter into what is referred to as an “information-sharing agreement” with the Attorney General regarding “suspected violations of state and federal elections laws,” the Attorney General is allowed to withhold grants and other funds from those states, the executive order says.
“If there is any effort to apply an entirely new criteria to receiving funding that is not in any law that Congress passed, I think that’s likely to be found to be an excess use of power by the president,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research similarly TPM during a media briefing this week.
In the words of the order, if there is a break in this information pipeline between the state and the DOJ, the Attorney General is given the authority to “review for potential withholding of grants and other funds that the Department awards and distributes, in the Department’s discretion, to State and local governments for law enforcement and other purposes, as consistent with applicable law.”
Election experts confirmed to TPM that this means state election officials may lose the funding they need to hold elections in their states for not agreeing to share information about routine election administration and voter roll maintenance with the Justice Department.
“There is this kind of extensive command for the attorney general not only to search out prosecution of election crimes, but to engage in all this information sharing to try to basically supplant states in their role,” Danielle Lang, Campaign Legal Center’s Senior Director of Voting Rights, explained in an interview with TPM. “But there is this kind of attempt to really force the Department of Justice to be front and center and demand all this information from the states and penalize the states that do not engage in this kind of joint weaponization of prosecution.”
The scope of the information that the EO is directing states to share with the DOJ is broad. If implemented, this “information sharing agreement” would require states to share information on people who have committed amorphous “election fraud,” as well as information on people who registered to vote more than once.
Registering to vote more than once, which more often than not happens because a voter’s old registration was never cancelled, is not actually a crime and is a common mistake that is cleaned up as part of state election officials’ routine voter roll maintenance duties.
“Duplicate registrations end up on the rolls for any number of reasons,” Lang added. “And all of that is just typical list maintenance and it’s not necessarily criminal and in fact is extremely common.”
I guess he got tired of having his efforts to steal Constitutionally mandated powers from the Congress blocked by the Judiciary and decided to shift his efforts to stealing Constitutionally mandated powers of the states. His EOs, starting from the first day, have gone way past being rock-solid grounds for impeachment. The GOP legislators, far from defending their Constitutional powers and duties, have instead become willing, if not eager, co-conspirators in this massive violation of one Constitutional provision after another. Sadly, only the Congress can expel lawless members, as they did following the start of the Civil War. But these days, it’s the criminals who are in the Congressional majority, not the defenders of the Constitution and the rule of law, so nothing whatsoever will happen, other than their continuing to enable Trump’s rampage of criming.
Vote. Them. Out. It’s about all that’s left that we can do.
Hmm. More lawlessness from the Mobsters “R” Us administration?
This must be a day that ends in “Y.”
My only question is what are California, Oregon and Washington waiting to secede? How about New York? New England can join Canada.
Touché.
There is a program that is meant to share data among the states to check that there aren’t multiple registrations active across the states for a single person. Republicans backed out of that, for the usual BS reasons, so it’s highly ironic that they now want to force all the states to share information through the DoJ. State’s rights apparently end when Republicans control the government. And, this is intended to give them the power to remove non-Republican voters from the roles…they can pick and choose every Juan Martinez across the nation and declare they are all fraudulent registrations. It’s a short step to declaring random Democrats as “illegal voters” for made up reasons, or starting investigations and pulling a voter’s rights while it’s in process.
Remember, it’s who counts the votes that matter, but if the vote counters can remove voters from the rolls ahead of time it’s a lot easier to make sure elections end up the way they want.