This week at Democracy Docket: Trump’s doomed anti-voting order, DeSantis spreads election lies — and Harmeet Dhilon for AG?

With his popularity plummeting, President Donald Trump took a major step this week aimed at grabbing control of U.S. elections. But in truth, the anti-voting executive order he issued Tuesday only underscored his weakness. 

As always, Democracy Docket brought you everything you needed to know on it.

Trump’s order attacks mail voting by telling the U.S. Postal Service — which the president doesn’t directly control — to refuse to deliver mail ballots from anyone not on a pre-approved list of confirmed citizens drawn up by his administration. Since Trump has made clear he wants an outright ban on no-excuse mail voting, the order was weaker than many had expected. 

Still, it’s an extremely dangerous attempt to assert power over the cornerstone of our democracy — elections. And within hours of the signing, Yunior Rivas reported on the uncompromising response from Democrats and voting advocates, summed up by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer: “See you in court. You will lose.”

Indeed, since then, no less than five federal lawsuits have been filed against the diktat — and we’ve covered all of them. In ominous news for Trump, Jim Saksa separately noted that the first of those cases — brought Wednesday by Schumer, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, and several party organizations* — was assigned to the same judge who last year blocked Trump’s first anti-voting order, finding that the Constitution “assigned no role at all to the president” in running elections. She’s all but certain to do the same thing again.

But it could get even worse for Trump. Jim followed up by reporting that, according to at least one leading elections expert, the order could actually backfire by undermining the Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuits filed against 30 states to try to obtain their unredacted voter rolls. 

“The only real legal effect of this executive order might be to kill the remaining DOJ lawsuits seeking to seize voter data,” David Becker told Jim.

Jacob Knutson covered Trump’s firing of Pam Bondi as attorney general, and noted one reason for the ouster that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved: that Bondi hadn’t moved quickly or aggressively enough to bring corrupt, politically motivated prosecutions against Trump’s enemies. And Yunior highlighted the growing online clamor among MAGA for DOJ Civil Rights division chief Harmeet Dhillon — under whom the division has done a 180-degree shift from protecting voting rights to attacking them, not to mention producing a constant stream of basic lawyering errors, typos, and other flubs — to be nominated as Bondi’s successor.

Speaking of which…Democracy Docket Legal Content Editor Ashley Cleaves conducted a fascinating video interview with Kristen Clarke, who served in Dhillon’s role during the Biden administration. Asked about those errors, Clarke didn’t hold back.

“It’s a Justice Department that has been decimated,” she said. “And its ranks are now being filled by people who are inexperienced, who don’t know what they’re doing, who’ve never enforced federal laws before.”

It’s worth watching the whole thing.

We also kept you updated on Fulton County, Georgia’s effort to get back the ballots and other election records seized by the FBI in its extraordinary January raid. Brentin Mock, who was at the March 27 federal court hearing in Atlanta on the issue, broke down how an expert witness for the county exposed what he called the “mind-boggling” errors in the bogus evidence underlying the affidavit the bureau obtained for the raid. 

And Jacob Knutson explained how the county is alleging that DOJ improperly used the raid to short-circuit ongoing legal proceedings in which it was trying to get access to the materials at issue. One piece of evidence Fulton cited for that claim, Yunior separately noted, was a social media post by Dhillon in which she wrote: “Fulton County refused to cooperate with @CivilRights request for 2020 election-related documents, alas.” It’s not the first time Dhillon’s active social media profile may have gotten her into trouble.

Meanwhile, with Trump’s monster voter suppression bill, the SAVE America Act, looking doomed in Congress, Florida has imposed its own version. Jen Rice reported that, at a signing ceremony for the measure, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — eyeing a second presidential run— ranted about “mass mail balloting,” “ballot harvesting,” and “Zuckerbucks” corrupting the 2020 election. 

Jen also checked in on Chad Bianco, the California sheriff who took it upon himself to seize 650,000 ballots from the state’s recent redistricting election, citing flimsy claims made by a far-right anti-voting group. The lawman’s probe is currently on hold pending a legal challenge — and it turns out that a recent court filing made by Bianco lawyers used made-up quotations in citing the law — perhaps as a result of using AI.  

Great work all around!

* The plaintiffs in the case are represented by the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.