Trump justice department threatens criminal charges against state election officials unless they provide list of voters After a federal judge dismissed a Department of Justice lawsuit seeking to compel Maryland to provide the federal government with an electronic copy of its statewide voter registration list, as the Trump administration attempts to assert control of state-run elections, Maryland’s top election official was threatened this week with criminal prosecution in a letter from Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil rights division.
The state’s elections administrator, Jared DeMarinis, described it to Maryland Matters, a nonprofit news site, as “a nice love letter from the Department of Justice threatening my arrest.”
“It is just unconscionable to threaten and try to intimidate election officials, not just in Maryland, but throughout the United States,” DeMarinis added.
“After losing in court,” Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen wrote on social media with a link to the Maryland Matters report, the Trump administration “is now threatening election officials in Maryland and across the country to get access to voter rolls. This is yet another outrageous attempt to sow doubt in our democracy & intimidate states. We must hold the line.”
Dhillon told Real America’s Voice, a far-right network created to host Steve Bannon’s podcast, that she sent similar letters, threatening “potential criminal penalties” for “knowingly retaining noncitizens” on registered voter lists, to election officials in every US state this week.
Speaking to the pro-Trump host John Solomon, Dhillon mocked the “hyperventilating” response to her letter from Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson.
Henderson, who has also pushed back on the administration’s attempt to have the US Post Office refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not submit lists of approved voters to the federal government, wrote on social media:
double quotation mark Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.
Washington’s Democratic secretary of state, Steve Hobbs, accused the Department of Justice of “accelerating down a slippery slope” by issuing criminal threats to him and other state officials who are empowered to administer elections by the US constitution’s elections clause.
“Attempts to revive disproven claims of rigged elections will not deter election professionals from doing their job of overseeing accessible, accurate, auditable elections,” Hobbs said in a statement after receiving his letter from Dhillon.
Although Donald Trump signed an executive order early in his second term attempting to take control of major parts of the nation’s election systems, courts have ruled that the US president has no constitutional authority over federal election administration.
The nonprofit news site Votebeat reported earlier this week that although officials in all 50 states received the letter, “many did not immediately realize it; in several states, the Justice Department sent the letter to the generic email addresses listed on agency websites for use by the public.”
Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, told Votebeat, the letters are “in line with the Trump administration’s efforts to push the myth of mass noncitizen voting and to threaten and intimidate state and local election officials”.