This week at Democracy Docket: We reveal what could be DOJ’s most troubling hire yet — and weaponizing Chick-fil-A to restrict voting 

As President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) ramps up its campaign to interfere in the midterms, no news outlet is keeping a closer eye on its plans than Democracy Docket. 

On Friday, Yunior Rivas exclusively reported that the department’s Civil Rights Division appears to have hired a lawyer, David M. Levin, who served prison time a decade ago after pleading guilty to hacking into government election websites to expose potential security issues. 

Not only that, Levin was seen outside a Minneapolis polling place during the recent Minnesota primaries, seemingly part of DOJ’s election monitoring program. With the department announcing this week that it plans to flood the polls with 1,000 monitors this fall, Levin’s appearance may offer a sign of the types of lawyers who’ll be assigned to the task.

Levin would be only the latest in a string of attorneys with deeply troubling records of working to undermine fair elections whose hiring by Trump’s DOJ we’ve exposed.

Speaking of Minnesota and the DOJ, Jim Saksa reported that the department suffered its 23rd straight loss in a voter roll case, with no wins, when a federal court this week dismissed its lawsuit against the North Star State. 

Still, we shouldn’t let down our guard on this one. DOJ keeps appealing its losses, seemingly with the goal of getting the issue to the Trump-friendly Supreme Court. As Brentin Mock wrote, Attorney General Todd Blanche last week said appealing to the high court, despite the department’s abject record in the cases, is “absolutely” a possibility. 

With that in mind, Yunior took a close look at the arguments DOJ might use to try to convince the justices to reverse numerous lower courts and give it access to states’ rolls.

Meanwhile, Brentin reported Saturday that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) announced the final version of a rule intended to implement Trump’s dangerous March executive order aimed at cracking down on mail voting. 

USPS will work to “provide federal law enforcement with a list of individuals to whom states planned to mail a ballot … which the Postal Service understands will help to facilitate enforcement of federal law,” reads the rule.

In other words, the Trump administration will decide who gets a mail ballot and who doesn’t.

We’re currently waiting on the Supreme Court to decide whether to lift a lower court injunction that blocked USPS from implementing the order nationwide — a ruling that could come any day.

In other news, Trump and his team continue to fabricate data and evidence as they stoke fear about illegal voting. 

“I WON THE ELECTION,” a deranged Trump yelled on social media after his Census Bureau released a “report” purporting to show that thousands of noncitizens voted in 2020. 

In fact, as Yunior and Jim explained, the unsigned report “relie[d] on an incomplete commercial voter file and record-matching methods that raise serious concerns about the accuracy of its conclusions.”

The election administration David Becker said it “fails the laugh test.”

And of course, even if the report were accurate, the numbers at issue aren’t nearly enough to mean Trump won the election.

Separately, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security this week embarrassingly walked back claims that thousands of noncitizens were found on Nevada’s rolls, admitting that the true number of potential noncitizens was 185. 

“This whole exercise has been bulls**t,” Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) told Jacob Knutson and Yunior. “Their whole desire to create confusion, create chaos, create lack of confidence in the electoral process is all bulls**t.”

If you want some more bulls**t, look to North Carolina. Natalie Haussman covered a meeting of the state election board, which approved one county’s plan to end voting on Sunday after a local Republican official made the novel argument that Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays, so the polls should be too. 

For good measure, the state board also greenlighted a plan to deny students at the nation’s largest HBCU, North Carolina A&T State University, an on-campus polling site. And, as Natalie and Senior Legal Editor Andrew Childers noted, more evidence emerged that a notorious GOP operative had driven the state-wide push for counties to restrict voting.

Finally, Jen Rice and Yunior kept readers updated on Missouri Republicans’ long-running bid to prevent voters from weighing in on the gerrymander the GOP passed last year. 

Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) recently denied the referendum a place on the November ballot — even though pro-democracy campaigners gathered more than enough signatures — citing a fringe legal theory. After a lower court sided with Hoskins this week, the state Supreme Court moved quickly to take up the case before the September 8 deadline for making changes to the ballot. 

That means we should know soon whether the GOP will get away with destroying a majority-Black congressional district at Trump’s behest — or whether voters will get the chance to insist on a fair map.