ICYMI at Democracy Docket: DOJ’s new anti-voting lawyers; and the hilarious incompetence of its push for state voter data

Thanks to the holiday, it’s been a few weeks since we provided a weekly roundup of our reporting. So this edition will include some of the great Democracy Docket work that you may have missed from over the festive period.

Our team has been digging in on what’s probably the most important ongoing voting story of 2026, which will shape the voting access landscape for the midterms: the unprecedented push by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to obtain state voter rolls. 

One avenue we’ve been pursuing — which the legacy media seems strangely uninterested in — is excavating the troubling records of some of the lawyers that DOJ has brought on for the effort.

In our latest report on that front, Democracy Docket’s Yunior Rivas exclusively revealed that two new hires have backgrounds steeped in the conspiracy-driven election denial movement. One worked on the notorious fake electors scheme in Georgia, alongside Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, and other leaders of the plot to steal the 2020 election. He’s now on DOJ’s lawsuit that aims to seize actual ballots, not just voter records, from Fulton County, Ga., in order to relitigate 2020. 

Another new hire was until recently a leader of Mitchell’s powerful anti-voting network. 

Yunior also brought you the news of DOJ’s latest two lawsuits in its voter rolls campaign, filed against Arizona and Connecticut. In a podcast interview with Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias, conducted hours before his state was sued, Arizona Sec. of State Adrian Fontes (D) cited serious privacy concerns with DOJ’s demands, and told the Feds they’d need to “put me in jail’ if they want Arizona’s voter rolls. (Don’t miss Marc’s full interview with Fontes, which will be available on our YouTube channel this week.)

DOJ’s bid to seize state voter rolls has now led it to sue 23 states and Washington, D.C over the issue. Democracy Docket’s Jim Saksa leveraged findings from our Research team to report that the department has filed over half of all the anti-voting lawsuits this cycle — another marker of its 180-shift away from its traditional mission to protect voting rights. 

Still, although DOJ’s campaign may be aggressive and dangerous, it’s also been, much of the time, incompetent. 

“Across correspondence, court filings and public statements,” reported Yunior, Jim, and Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen, “the DOJ has stumbled repeatedly — sending requests to the wrong offices, misidentifying officials, citing fake federal statutes and leaving behind a trail of clerical and legal errors that have increasingly undercut the department’s claim to be safeguarding elections.”

Here’s a taste of the kind of errors they’re talking about: 

“In July, the DOJ sent a demand for election data to Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski. There was just one problem — Godlewski does not oversee elections in Wisconsin. That responsibility belongs to the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, a structure that has been in place for years and is well known to anyone familiar with the state’s election system.”

Meanwhile, Democracy Docket’s Jen Rice noted some intriguing news about another major GOP-driven threat to voting. 

We told you that Ohio, after pressure from the Trump administration, recently advanced to the governor’s desk a bill to scrap the four-day grace period it gives mail ballots, which will cause some voters to be disenfranchised by postal delays. We also told you that the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a GOP bid to ban grace periods nationwide. As Jen reported, when Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) signed his state’s bill, he said he did so only because the timing of a SCOTUS ruling imposing a ban — perhaps coming just a few months before voting begins — could throw the state’s election preparations into chaos. 

In other words, before arguments have even been heard, the court case, which was brought by the Republican National Committee, is already spurring states — or perhaps giving them a handy excuse — to eliminate their grace periods, mail delays be damned.

Finally, Democracy Docket’s Jacob Knutson was all over some little-noticed comments made by Attorney General Pam Bondi to a right-wing journalist. 

For months, MAGA insiders have been murmuring about a DOJ investigation into election meddling by officials in the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, being conducted by federal prosecutors in Florida. As Jacob reported, Bondi all but confirmed the corrupt probe, saying it would target “a ten-year stain on the country committed by high-ranking officials against the American people.” 

Again, much of the legacy media reacted with a shrug, or didn’t notice Bondi’s comments at all. I guess it’s par for the course these days for mainstream news outlets to downplay the dangers to our democracy. But at Democracy Docket, we’re going to keep sounding the alarm.