DOJ is 0-23 in court, so now it’s sending 1,000 monitors to the polls

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Donald Trump’s Justice Department took a major step toward subverting elections this fall. On Monday, it quietly announced that it will deploy 1,000 election monitors at polling places during this year’s midterm elections.

The news came a day after Attorney General Todd Blanche floated taking the DOJ’s fight for state voter data to the Supreme Court. These two events are surely connected, and how they are resolved will directly impact how free and fair the midterm elections end up being.

The last few months have been a series of humiliating defeats for Trump and his hand-picked DOJ. The Department has seen high-profile criminal cases collapse and has suffered embarrassing reversals in court.

Blanche was forced to abandon the bogus slush fund he negotiated to secure the votes necessary to be confirmed as attorney general. The DOJ lost in the Supreme Court on the president’s signature issue — birthright citizenship.

Then there are the repeated failures to enact the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Trump has not only staked his political credibility on its passage but clearly sees it as essential to Republican victories.

Against that backdrop, the DOJ’s signature election litigation initiative has turned into a complete debacle. By the time Blanche told Kristen Welker that the Department might bring the voter file cases to the Supreme Court, the DOJ was 0-22. By the end of Monday, it was 0-23.

It is into this maelstrom that Harmeet Dhillon announced the DOJ would deploy 1,000 election monitors. While the DOJ has historically sent election monitors to places where minority voters and the disabled have suffered discrimination, the proposed deployment is much larger — and far more ominous.

At one level, this can be explained as a needed diversion from the narrative that Trump is losing in the courts. But to dismiss it as simply a short-term PR stunt ignores how it fits into Trump’s broader plan to subvert elections he is nearly certain to lose.

In making the announcement, Dhillon directly referenced deploying monitors to “places where there might be voter fraud issues that we have seen.” Such places, of course, do not exist, because voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. More importantly, when it does happen, it is opportunistic and scattershot — not concentrated and predictable in a way that lends itself to monitoring.

In reality, this is nothing but a smokescreen to justify the widespread deployment of federal agents at polling places. The Civil Rights Division doesn’t even have the number of employees necessary to meet Dhillon’s commitment.

To deploy 1,000 monitors, the DOJ will necessarily need to rely on untrained personnel from other parts of the federal government. While these may come from other sections of the DOJ, there is no guarantee that the Trump administration will follow the law and regular practice.

Instead, we should assume they will assert powers they do not have in order to achieve Trump’s political goals. That is what we have seen time and again from this administration and this Department. With control of Congress in the balance, it is what we should expect here.

Even if most or all of the monitors are DOJ employees, we should assume they will be drawn from the ranks of the most eager Trump loyalists. Whether political appointees or simply employees seeking to curry favor with Blanche and his leadership team, the result will be the same.

Either way, these monitors will not be judged on honest reports of what is happening at the polls. Rather, they will be expected to generate information that can be weaponized against voters and election officials, so that results can be cast in doubt and certifications challenged.

Already, Dhillon is falsely claiming that some election officials are “knowingly allowing noncitizens to stay on the voter rolls” — noting, ominously, that “this is a federal crime.” I wish I could say this intimidation won’t work. In many places it won’t. But in some communities, it may.

In response to this announcement, some former DOJ officials will no doubt revert to the norms of an era that no longer exists. They will explain that the DOJ has been monitoring elections for decades. They will assure the public that good civil servants still remain in the Department.

We simply cannot entrust the future of our elections to nostalgia for a Department that no longer exists. There was no doubt a time when lawyers at the DOJ were unquestionably the good guys — protecting minority voters from racial discrimination at the polls. But that is not the case today.

Today, the DOJ is run by the president’s former defense lawyer. It is staffed in the senior ranks by election deniers and Trump sycophants. Its Voting Section is no longer working to aid voters but to undermine the franchise.

That is why the DOJ wants your voter data. It is why Blanche will no doubt take that fight to the Supreme Court. And it is why Dhillon announced the deployment of 1,000 election monitors.

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