| On Thursday, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against California to prevent the state from counting ballots from 20,000 people deemed “likely” noncitizens. The lawsuit is fatally flawed, but for this administration, that is almost entirely beside the point. It represents the latest development in what is — for all practical purposes — an ongoing effort by the Justice Department to interfere in the midterm elections. |
| The main problem with the Justice Department’s lawsuit is a simple one: Federal law prohibits states from systematically removing the names of ineligible voters (sometimes colloquially referred to as “purges”) in the 90-day period leading up to an election. |
| For that reason alone, the lawsuit is not likely to go anywhere. In fact, the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to force the state to violate federal law. The whole thing is upside down. |
| This is, of course, on top of the fact that the administration’s allegations and bloated estimates of noncitizen voting have been extremely wrong. The Department of Homeland Security claimed at one point, for instance, that Nevada had 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but that estimate quickly collapsed, and the administration has thus far failed to identify a single noncitizen on the rolls. |
| Still, all of this activity, including the new lawsuit against California, serves other purposes — to continue to stoke fears over noncitizen voting, to rile up Trump supporters and potentially drive them to the polls (dubious, but still), to lay the groundwork for post-midterm legal challenges by the Trump administration to election results, and, if all of that fails, to further undermine confidence in US elections. |
| The Trump DOJ’s harassment of state officials over their voter rolls is not the only way that it is currently meddling in the elections. |
| The effort to prosecute, denaturalize, and deport Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar bears the same hallmarks. Thus far, the actual evidence of any criminal misconduct on the part of Omar appears slim to nonexistent, but Trump hates both Omar and Somalis, so he appears to be abusing his authority to target her for partisan and racist reasons. |
| Even if you assume the absolute worst-case scenario — that Omar is guilty of some form of criminal misconduct — the administration has offered no explanation for why the search of her home in Washington, D.C., this week had to take place less than three weeks before the election. The most logical inference is that the timing was driven by the election calendar and by political objectives — including furthering the Trump administration’s broader narrative that the country is being taken over by foreigners and minorities. |
| The Trump DOJ has also abused its authority in the recent spate of criminal cases based on “voting by aliens in federal elections.” For one thing, almost all of these cases have been brought against lawful permanent residents — people who are in the country legally and who may have been under the misimpression that they were entitled to vote. That is why the DOJ uses the word “aliens” (foreigners) and not the phrase “illegal aliens.” |
| The DOJ has also worked overtime to try to influence the press coverage and public perception of these cases. It has repurposed the same cases in multiple press releases, and it has included blurred photos of the defendants being arrested in those releases — something that the DOJ almost never does. The effect — which is not remotely subtle — is to create an exaggerated perception of the pervasiveness of “voting by aliens” and to publicly stigmatize these “aliens” in ways that the department does not even do for accused terrorists. |
| Last but not least, the Trump administration and Attorney General Todd Blanche have been taking credit all year for the national decline in the homicide rate, and they have amped up these claims in the run-up to the midterms. The problem is that there are almost no credible experts who believe that the Trump DOJ has had anything to do with it. |
| Indeed, just this week, the Council on Criminal Justice released a lengthy report on this issue that summarizes the results of a poll of nearly 50 crime scholars who convened last month for a conference to explore the drop in homicides and its potential causes. The CCJ is the same organization whose data has been publicly cited by Republicans who have taken credit for the trend. |
| The survey revealed that almost no one believes that the Trump administration’s signature criminal enforcement efforts — the immigration enforcement crackdown and the deployment of the National Guard — have contributed to the decline in the homicide rate. When the respondents were asked whether the increase in immigration enforcement had anything to do with the decline in the homicide rate, 94% of them said that the effect of the crackdown on homicides was either negligible or nonexistent. |
| The number was somehow even worse when the respondents were asked about the National Guard: 98% of them said that the deployment’s effect on the homicide rate was either negligible or nonexistent. Suffice to say that it is rare for an expert consensus to so clearly contradict the White House and DOJ’s repeated public claims. |
| As we head toward the midterm elections, there is plenty of reason to worry that the Trump administration and the DOJ will try to interfere with the outcome — perhaps by lobbing false claims of election fraud in certain races where Democrats prevail, and perhaps even by trying to seize voting machines and ballots. People are right to remain vigilant. |
| Still, a historic national scandal — the use and abuse of the Justice Department to interfere in a federal election for partisan purposes — is already unfolding right before our eyes. |
