Unlike delegitimizing democracy and disenfranchising voters, truth and accuracy have never been Trump priorities. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
This summer the Trump administration’s Department of Justice sent letters to election officials in several states, including Nevada, asking them to provide lists of registered voters and other information, part of the Trump administration’s threat that states better fall in line with the DOJ’s quest to discredit elections in the U.S. or else.
At least two states have told the DOJ to buzz off.
New Hampshire’s secretary of state, a Republican, informed the DOJ that state law “authorizes the Secretary of State to release the statewide voter registration list in limited circumstances not applicable here.”
Maine’s secretary of state, a Democrat who is running for governor, responded slightly less formally, suggesting the DOJ can “Go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”
In Nevada, the statewide voter registration list is public information, so Nevada Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar sent it the DOJ.
The DOJ’s request to Nevada also asked Aguilar’s office to describe processes for making sure deceased registrants, noncitizen registrants, and voters who have moved out of the state aren’t voting.
Those requests echo unproven allegations routinely but unfoundedly tossed around in Nevada over the years by Trump’s campaign and his minions, especially after Trump lost the state to Joe Biden in 2020.
The Nevada SOS office’s response, sent to the DOJ last week, referred the DOJ to state statutes and described procedures to safeguard the accuracy of voter registration lists — the sort of procedures state and local officials have described in forums, panels and such on multiple occasions in recent years. In other words, more stuff that is already public information in Nevada.
Meanwhile, the DOJ’s Criminal Division sent a separate request via email to the Nevada SOS office on July 10 seeking “a potential information-sharing agreement” on ineligible voters or voters who “may have” committed fraud or “engaged in unlawful conduct relevant to the election process.”
“With your cooperation, we plan to use this information to enforce Federal election laws and protect the integrity of Federal elections,” reads the email to the state from the DOJ’s Criminal Division.
Both the June and July requests to Nevada from the DOJ stem from an executive order Trump issued in March on “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”
Reminder: Over the last decade, each and every one of the thousands upon thousands of times Trump has spoken about election integrity, his aim has not been to preserve and protect elections, but to undermine and delegitimize them and disenfranchise voters.
Those are Trump’s goals now, in ordering (executive ordering, to be precise) U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice to meddle in elections in Nevada and other states.
Like the DOJ’s request to Nevada — and like Trump’s demagoguery over the last ten years — Trump’s March executive order suggests voter fraud is rampant. Voter fraud is in fact exceedingly rare. But unlike delegitimizing democracy and disenfranchising voters, truth and accuracy have never been Trump priorities.
“The White House tried to overhaul our election system through an unconstitutional executive order,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the nonprofit States United Democracy Center, in a statement this week.
“As federal agencies like the DOJ push to implement it, they’re reaching past their authority and furthering the same lies about our elections that the order is based on,” Lydgate said.
Nice little democracy you got there…
Under Trump’s order/threat, if states don’t do as the DOJ asks (no matter how unconstitutional) U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordered to…
…prioritize enforcement of Federal election integrity laws in such States to ensure election integrity given the State’s demonstrated unwillingness to enter into an information-sharing agreement or to cooperate in investigations and prosecutions.
The underlying premise of Trump’s executive order and the DOJ letters is that U.S. elections can’t be trusted. Like so much of what Trump has said or posted on social media over the years, that’s a lie.
Nevada Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford and his California counterpart, Ron Bonta, are co-leaders of a suit filed by multiple attorneys general that claims Trump’s executive order on elections is unconstitutional.
A joint press release announcing that suit in April included quotes from Aguilar calling Trump’s executive order “an unlawful attempt to grab power from both the states and Congress.”
“The United States Constitution is clear: states have primary responsibility for the administration of elections,” Aguilar said in the release. “Even worse, the order is backed by threats to take away funding for election security and integrity.”
Aguilar was referring to the executive order’s promise to take federal election money away from states that don’t comply with its commands and directives.
Nevada needs to tell Trump where he can put his election order
Federal spending on elections is pitifully small, and from the moment Trump issued his order the obvious thing for states to do, along with suing him, was to tell him to shove it.
Aguilar’s office has not responded to the DOJ’s cheeky July 10 email asking the Nevada secretary of state’s office to voluntarily cooperate with a scheme (some of which has already been halted by courts) to assault voting rights and further erode public faith in democracy — the Trump objectives driving the DOJ’s correspondence.
Pollsters and the Democratic consultants who love them tell us most voters don’t really care about democracy all that much. That may be true. A critical mass of today’s voters seem likely to be more enthusiastic about the prospect of a WWF show on the White House lawn than free and fair elections.
But Aguilar’s job doesn’t (or shouldn’t) afford him the luxury of whistling in the dark while U.S. democracy continues its backslide into a “competitive authoritarianism” where there are still elections, but just for show.
Since his election in 2022, Aguilar had demonstrated a (not always welcome) fondness for comity and good manners. If and when he responds to Trump’s bullyboy threats, the appropriate thing for Aguilar to do would be to jettison the politeness, and tell Trump and the DOJ stooges to to go jump in the Gulf of … oh, let’s say … Mexico.
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Author: Hugh Jackson
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