Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is going to investigate voter fraud, and given the monster that Martin is, he’s probably going to find some despite its nonexistence. He has spun up what he’s pompously calling “Special Unit: Election Accountability” as if he’s helming a “Law & Order” spinoff.
Martin is emerging as one of the dumbest villains in the villain-stuffed Trump administration. In part, that’s because he’s exceptionally unqualified to be a U.S. attorney, having no experience whatsoever that would warrant making him the top prosecutor for the nation’s capital.
Martin’s past work is limited to writing pro-Trump garbage with conservative anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and unsuccessfully running for elected office in Missouri. What Martin does have experience in, however, is being a true-blue election denier who was present on Jan. 6 and then became the defense attorney for several insurrectionists.
Since taking office, he has helped a GOP congressman avoid domestic violence charges, threatened an elected Democrat who called Elon Musk a “dick,” and, in his role as prosecutor, dismissed criminal charges for a J6 rioter he still represented as defense counsel. Sadly, that’s what counts for relevant expertise in this administration.
Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach
If Martin’s plan to investigate elections sounds familiar, it’s because during his first administration, Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He stuffed it to the gills with voter suppression enthusiasts like then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Kobach has spent his career trying to make it harder for people to vote, and he was primed to find rampant fraud during the 2016 election. The commission lasted only seven months before Trump shuttered it, perhaps because it didn’t find any evidence of the widespread voter fraud Trump was desperate to find.
Compared to Martin, though, Kobach is a mere amateur. Martin only has his current job because of his devotion to “the big lie” and his involvement in the “Stop the Steal” movement. He’ll be driven to unearth voter fraud even though study after study after study has found it to be vanishingly rare. An Associated Press review of six swing states from the 2020 election found 475 potential voter fraud cases out of more than 25 million ballots cast.
When he announced the election accountability unit, Martin also said he had already opened one investigation. Of course, neither he nor anyone else in the administration will say what that investigation is, with Martin instead musing about that time 20 years ago when he found some unspecified voter fraud in Missouri.
It isn’t even clear whether Martin, as a U.S. attorney for D.C. only, would have the authority to conduct a nationwide investigation into voter fraud. Even when the previous Voter Fraud Commission was created by the president, at least 44 states refused to provide much of the voter data demanded, in large part because the commission demanded confidential data.
Of course, the failure of the original Voter Fraud Commission occurred before Trump’s 2020 loss and the widespread GOP acceptance of “the big lie.” A lot of Republican-led states may have found Trump’s 2017 demand to traipse through their voter data an overreach. But now that election denial is the default position of many election officials and Republican candidates, conservatives will likely be much more inclined to assist in Martin’s project.
U.S. Federal Election Commission Commissioner Ellen Weintraub Ed
While Martin is pretending that nonexistent voter fraud is threatening the integrity of U.S. elections, Trump is busy dismantling the parts of the government that actually protect elections. Trump has tried to remove Federal Elections Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a longtime champion of actual election integrity efforts such as combatting the corrosive effects of dark money on elections.
Trump also kneecapped the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which assisted and trained state election officials on everything from cyberattacks to the safety of their workers. In February, the administration put 17 CISA employees on administrative leave, including people hired to combat foreign influence in elections. Trump also slashed funding, so there will no longer be funding for assessing or responding to cyberthreats or working with state government officials.
Instead of helping to guard elections against digital attacks and manipulation by foreign actors, Trump is going to have Musk handle everything. Somehow voting will happen without computers because Elon told him that “computers are not meant for voting, it’s just not good, it’s too many transactions taking place, too quickly.”
The administration has comprehensively rejected any responsibility to keep U.S. elections safe from actual hazards. The 2024 election saw a massive number of attempted cyberattacks on election websites. China, Iran, and Russia all tried to interfere in the 2024 election.
Now the country is vulnerable to those very real threats while Martin pushes the very not real threat of voter fraud. Meanwhile, hackers and foreign actors are going to have a field day.
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