This week at Democracy Docket: SCOTUS hears a GOP voter suppression bid, on the ground in Fulton County, and a lawless MAGA sheriff

The anti-democracy onslaught continues apace. And we’re keeping you up to date on all of it. 

As Republicans urged the Supreme Court to put new restrictions on mail voting, our liveblog delivered up-to-the-minute coverage. We were on the ground in Atlanta for a federal court hearing on the FBI’s raid of a county elections building. We kept tracking the GOP’s doomed bid to ram the SAVE Act thru the Senate. We used some social media detective work to expose yet another hilariously embarrassing flub by Trump’s reckless and incompetent Department of Justice (DOJ). And, we dug deep on the most undercovered voting story of the week: the California MAGA sheriff who seized over half a million ballots from a recent election.

Let’s start right there, in fact. Beyond the Golden State, the legacy media hasn’t taken much interest in the sheriff’s ballot seizure, despite the state now suing to reverse it. But we think that when law enforcement, citing flimsy claims by right-wing activists, literally confiscates votes after a democratic election, it’s not something we should normalize.

Democracy Docket’s reporting surfaced crucial context on Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s extremism. Yunor Rivas exclusively revealed Bianco’s history of incendiary anti-voting rhetoric online, including his view that: “Some people should never be allowed to vote.” Jen Rice explained how Bianco, who is running for governor, and the conservative judge from whom he obtained the warrant for the seizure had each endorsed each other’s campaigns. Matt Cohen unspooled the shady history of the anti-voting group that supplied the “research” driving Bianco’s probe. And contributor Jessica Pishko, a longtime expert on the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, detailed Bianco’s ties to a network of far-right law enforcement personnel — including the Oathkeepers militia that played a role in the January 6 attacks.

Back in Washington, D.C., the Supreme Court heard Watson v. RNC, a dangerous bid by the Republican National Committee to bar states from counting mail ballots that arrive after election day. Our liveblog, featuring analysis from Democracy Docket’s expert Legal Research team, covered every detail of the arguments, in which many of the conservative justices seemed eager to embrace a deeply restrictive view of federal election law. And as Jim Saksa explained, there’s even reason to worry that, if late-arriving ballots are banned, early voting could be in the GOP’s crosshairs next.

Jim also kept you up to date on the latest Republican ideas to pass the SAVE Act, President Donald Trump’s monster voter suppression bill. One involves using something called “reconciliation,” which you don’t really need to understand — the key point is that it isn’t likely to be any more successful than the whole “talking filibuster” plan was. 

Meanwhile, Jacob Knutson explained how the SAVE Act’s most important House champion was caught revealing that his aide “had to go through a bunch of hoops” to get an ID after changing her name when she got married. The admission bolsters Democratic claims that the bill will create major hurdles for married women who want to vote — and has SAVE backers desperately playing defense.

Brentin Mock was in an Atlanta courtroom for us Friday to hear the DOJ argue that they should be allowed to keep the election records they grabbed recently from a Fulton County elections center. As Brentin reported, an election security expert testified for the county that the information in the affidavit used for the raid — which was based on long-debunked claims from election deniers — “does not make sense and has no substantial basis in reality.”

And speaking of DOJ, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t bring you yet more humiliating screwups by your Department of Justice. 

This week, as Jim explained, voting section chief Eric Neff begged a court’s forgiveness after failing to properly serve Washington’s chief elections official in DOJ’s lawsuit to obtain the state’s voter rolls.(One problem, though only one: The complaint was sent to the wrong address, after miscommunication with the local U.S. attorney’s office). Neff, you might remember, is the same guy who left his job as a local prosecutor in L.A. after costing taxpayers $5 million by bringing a bogus case based on a tip from election deniers.

That might not have been the department’s most egregious fumble, though. Yunior took a close look at a photo posted online by civil rights division chief Harmeet Dhillon, and noticed that it accidentally reveals DOJ is probing Ohio State Univeristy for racial discrimination — not something the department has anounced.

You can bet DOJ’s bungling will continue. And we’ll love telling you all about it.