Former DOJ Lawyers Fear Department ‘Doesn’t Plan to Enforce Voting Rights Laws at All’ 

Senior managers reassigned. A directive to drop all voting rights litigation. A new mission statement focusing on voter fraud. 

Changes to the voting section of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Trump administration, reported in recent weeks by The Guardian, have alarmed several former voting section lawyers who spoke with Democracy Docket. And they threaten to neuter the federal government’s most important voting rights enforcement arm at a time when access to the ballot is under attack.

Still, for all the threat they carry, implementing these moves may not be as straightforward as the administration hopes, the lawyers said.

Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division, told Democracy Docket he sees the reassignment of senior voting section managers to other roles as “a pretty clear sign that the civil rights division doesn’t plan to enforce voting rights laws at all in this regard.”

Omar Noureldin, the senior vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, who previously served as senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Biden administration, warned in a statement that the assault on the voting section “is doing profound and lasting damage to the protection of voting rights in the United States.”

“The removal and reassignment of the section’s leadership and the dismissal of cases are themselves attacks on the voting rights of every American,” Noureldin added.

The DOJ declined to comment to Democracy Docket on the reassignments.

But taking these changes from the level of statements to effective policy may be a challenge.

“One characteristic of the Trump administration is that their marketing doesn’t always match what they view,” said Levitt. “They enjoy characterizing their own approach in a way that is sometimes at odds with the facts on the ground.”

For instance, Levitt noted, the voting section’s new mission statement prioritizes “preventing illegal voting, fraud and other forms of malfeasance and error.” But investigating and prosecuting election crimes is a function that’s long been assigned to the DOJ’s criminal division — not its civil rights division, where the voting section is housed. 

To reassign those duties from the criminal division to the civil rights division isn’t as easy as writing up a new mission statement.

“There are actually regulations that divide up the responsibility of the civil rights division,” Levitt said. “Those regulations can be changed, but that has to be changed through the regulatory process. And those regulations do not include authority for most of the civil rights division to prosecute voter fraud.”

Another former voting section attorney sounded a similar note. 

“Like anything with the current administration, they can make a lot of broad pronouncements that are intended to make people mad, but I’m really curious about what the execution looks like,” the attorney, who worked in the voting section during Trump’s first term, told Democracy Docket. 

The change to the mission statement, the attorney added, suggests the administration has a poor understanding of the section’s record.

“Presenting these as two sides of a spectrum — ensuring voting rights and preventing voter fraud — it’s just, I think, an inaccurate way of describing both the mission of the work, and the work that has been done in the last several decades,” the former DOJ attorney said.

Much of the voting section’s work includes enforcing voter list maintenance laws under the National Voter Registration Act. And the DOJ helps enforce a Help America Vote Act requirement that states maintain a statewide voter registration database.

“That’s one of the best innovations in preventing voter fraud that we’ve seen,” the former DOJ attorney added. 

Prior to Trump’s return to the White House, the voting section had a chief and seven managers overseeing nearly 30 attorneys. According to reporting from The Guardian, the section chief and five managers were reassigned to the complaint adjudication office, while another manager was reassigned to an antisemitism task force and another retired. 

“These are senior managers with decades of nonpartisan expertise, people who have enforced the law on the books in Republican administrations and Democratic administrations, in the first Trump administration,” Levitt said. “The notion that the people who know what they’re doing have been transferred out of that experience is a pretty clear sign that the civil rights division doesn’t plan to enforce voting rights laws at all in this regard.”

Levitt is also worried that the gutting of the voting section will have a “particularly stark impact” on the DOJ’s enforcement of the Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) — especially when it comes to ensuring military voters aren’t disenfranchised. Under Trump’s anti-voting executive order, all military and overseas voters will need to show proof of citizenship and residency in order to vote. 

Without the DOJ to help enforce UOCAVA, Levitt said “it’s going to make it real hard for a private party to step in and it might well lead to members in the military who are putting our lives on the line to defend us being deprived of their ability to cast ballots. That’s reprehensible.”

DOJ attorneys also have reportedly been instructed to drop all active voting rights cases. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the DOJ has slowly been withdrawing from Biden-era voting rights cases — including challenges to voter suppression measures in Georgia and Virginia, among others. 

But it remains involved in at least 29 voting rights or redistricting cases across 18 states, according to Democracy Docket’s litigation tracker. 

In all but two of those cases, there are private plaintiffs who would continue litigation. One of the lawsuits where the DOJ is the sole plaintiff is a challenge to two Wisconsin towns’ decision to ban the use of electronic voting machines for federal elections. The other lawsuit is against Fayette County, Tennessee and its board of county commissioners, alleging that the board’s 2021 redistricting plan violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In February, the Fayette-Sommerville Branch of the NAACP filed an identical lawsuit against Fayette County, which means litigation will continue if the DOJ drops its lawsuit.