The Trump administration is mounting a coordinated assault on voting access through the Justice Department, FBI investigations, and executive orders restricting mail-in ballots, all grounded in discredited claims about the 2020 election that experts say threaten to undermine the voting rights of millions.
Election denialists now hold influential positions across federal agencies. The DOJ has filed lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data from 30 states, including drivers' licenses and Social Security numbers. The FBI is investigating debunked fraud allegations in Georgia, Wisconsin, and other swing states Trump lost to Joe Biden. And in March, Trump issued an executive order that grants the United States Postal Service unprecedented power to restrict mail-in voting, a practice Trump has long blamed for fraud without evidence.
The multi-pronged campaign collides with constitutional law. States, not the federal government, control elections. Lawsuits from 23 Democratic states, voting rights groups, and nonpartisan organizations are already challenging these measures in court.
Eileen O'Connor, a former senior counsel at the DOJ's voting rights division who spent eight years there, called the voter data lawsuits an overreach. "The Department of Justice has no authority to sweep up the voter rolls, which contain private information like drivers' licenses and social security numbers, from every state in the nation," she said. "The department has 30 active lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to force the turnover of these sensitive records. So far, eight courts have issued rulings in these cases, and the DoJ has lost each one."
O'Connor pointed to the broader pattern. "Lawsuits against the states are only one part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to interfere with elections. The administration has targeted election officials, attempted to rewrite election rules, pardoned January 6 rioters, and elevated election deniers. It has also raised the prospect of deploying federal immigration agents at polling sites, but federal law explicitly bans federal officers from interfering in elections and prohibits armed federal agents from being deployed anywhere an election is held."
The voting section shift
The DOJ's voting rights division, traditionally tasked with protecting voting access, has been fundamentally transformed. Staff was cut from roughly 30 lawyers to fewer than 15. The department then hired attorneys with records of fighting Trump's 2020 election loss.
In April, Trump named former Republican congressman Dan Bishop of North Carolina, a vocal 2020 election denier, to lead a national voting fraud investigation just five months into his role as a U.S. attorney. William Mohrman, a Minneapolis lawyer involved in lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden's victory, was hired as senior counsel at the voting section. Court documents show Mohrman appeared on behalf of the government in a lawsuit demanding Georgia's unredacted voter registration records from 2020.
The new direction has abandoned the division's traditional focus on voting rights enforcement in favor of pursuing voter data and partisan redistricting fights. Last year, the DOJ backed a Texas redistricting plan that could hand Republicans five additional House seats while challenging a California plan voters approved that could benefit Democrats by five seats.
Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission now teaching at American University, said Trump's claims rest on a false foundation. "Trump continues to falsely claim that voting by foreign nationals, which is illegal and rarely occurs, and practices such as mail-in voting resulted in a fraudulent election in 2020 and will result in the 2026 midterm elections being rigged against Republicans. However, numerous audits and lawsuits have failed to find any meaningful fraud in the 2020 election."
Noble added: "Trump apparently believes that Democrats winning an election is proof enough that there was fraud because, as Trump has brazenly charged, 'If they didn't cheat, they could not win."
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche has declared on Fox News that there was "a ton of evidence that the election was rigged" in 2020, signaling the administration's commitment to these theories regardless of evidence.
In June, Trump claimed without specifics that California's primary elections, where Trump-backed candidate Spencer Pratt lost his early voting lead in a Los Angeles mayoral race, were rigged and "under investigation by the US attorney's office in Los Angeles." The DOJ dispatched a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing. Such immediate accusations foreshadow potential fraud claims in future elections if Trump disputes results.
The FBI has opened investigations into 2020 voting fraud in Georgia and Wisconsin, raided an election hub in Fulton County, seized election data and ballot images in Arizona, and demanded ballots in Michigan. In May, the bureau expanded inquiries to Milwaukee and visited homes of Wisconsin election officials investigating discredited conspiracy theories.
Trump's March executive order on mail-in voting has drawn the broadest legal pushback. It empowers the USPS to decide who can vote by mail and threatens criminal penalties for election workers and mail carriers who deliver ballots to people the administration deems ineligible. It also directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of citizens supposedly eligible to vote using incomplete federal data.
Federal courts have already blocked major provisions of Trump's 2025 voting order requiring passports for voter registration. The administration has appealed. The Brennan Center and other voting rights organizations warn that full implementation of the mail-in order would create chaos and disenfranchise millions of eligible voters while touching virtually non-existent fraud.
Even some Republican insiders see constitutional danger. "These attempts are clearly unconstitutional. States run elections, not the feds. One executive order even directs the US Postal Service to decide which voters can receive mail-in ballots and which not, as if they could manage such an assignment," said veteran Republican consultant Charlie Black.
Noble warned: "Trump's executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of verified US citizens eligible to vote and the Postal Service to limit mail-in voting could very well disenfranchise millions of voters while doing nothing to eliminate virtually non-existent voter fraud. Trump is using lies to justify an unprecedented effort to have the federal government take over the administration of elections, despite the constitution giving the states that power."
Author James Rodriguez: "This isn't about rooting out fraud that doesn't exist, it's about weaponizing the federal government to change who gets to vote."
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