Dem senators ‘raise the alarm’ over DOJ pullback on voter protections 

Senate Democrats called out the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Monday for reportedly taking a series of quiet steps to undermine federal voter protections this fall. 

Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent a blistering letter signed by more than 20 Democratic senators to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche Monday demanding assurances that DOJ will adhere to the department’s longstanding policy of not interfering in elections. 

The letter follows reporting by NOTUS that DOJ quietly removed the Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses manual from its website. The manual has long been a staple of the department’s Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division, and is usually updated before every election to keep up with the latest election threats and instruct lawyers on how to prosecute election crimes. 

According to NOTUS, DOJ also canceled election-integrity training sessions for FBI agents and federal prosecutors, fired the bulk of its Public Integrity Section attorneys, and has no plans to establish an Election Day “command center” to address voting emergencies. 

The senators warn that the removal of the election manual from the department’s website “continues to raise the alarm about DOJ’s involvement in the upcoming midterm elections for partisan political purposes.” The senators noted that the previous edition of the manual stated that DOJ prosecutors should not seize voting materials until after an election had been certified. 

“The manual published by the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division has been easily publicly accessible on the Department’s Election Crimes Branch website in both Democratic and Republican Administrations,” the senators wrote. “During President Trump’s first term, the manual was accompanied by a memorandum describing the Department’s longstanding election non-interference policy. While the manual underscores the importance of deterrence as the objective served by federal prosecutions of individuals who commit federal crimes in connection with an election, it also makes clear that ‘this deterrence is achieved by public awareness of the Department’s prosecutive interest in, and prosecution of, election fraud—not through interference with the process itself.’”

As the midterm election season heats up, DOJ is on a crusade to investigate bogus claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election — going so far as seizing ballots, demanding election equipment, and interrogating election workers in key swing-state counties. The DOJ is also suing 30 states and Washington, D.C. for their unredacted voter rolls, which the senators worry could be a “pretext for more meritless pre- and post-election challenges, including interfering with election certification.”

“Unsubstantiated claims by DOJ leadership of ‘tens of thousands noncitizens on voter rolls’ are reckless, as time and again, those claims have been refuted by findings that many individuals are falsely identified as noncitizens, and the extremely rare appearance of noncitizen registrants on the voter rolls or the even more extremely rare cases of noncitizen voters are often due to bureaucratic errors or misunderstandings about eligibility, as opposed to intentional fraud,” the letter reads.

John Keller, a former longtime DOJ attorney who was acting chief of the Public Integrity Section, blasted the current department leadership in an interview with Democracy Docket.

“This administration is abandoning decades-old policies and practices designed to minimize federal interference and elections in favor of open season for DOJ political leadership and the administration to attack election results whenever they don’t like them,” Keller said. 

By this point in election season, DOJ is typically gearing up to handle all matters of election issues that could possibly unfold during the midterms. But removing the election offenses manual from DOJ’s website is just one of many usual election season preparations the department appears to have dropped. 

Given all these actions, the letter demands answers from Blanche about the removal of the elections process manual from DOJ’s website to confirm the department won’t interfere in the upcoming midterms. 

“Any attempts by DOJ to file lawsuits to stop eligible voters from voting, their votes from being counted, or elections from being certified, will fail, but any attempts are still corrosive to public trust and confidence in our election administration and invite threats against nonpartisan election workers,” the senators warned.