Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice just filed its first lawsuit under the Help America Vote Act, which was passed in Congress in 2002 to make reforms to the voting process. Given the GOP’s enthusiasm for voter suppression, does it even need to be said that there is no way said lawsuit would help anyone vote?
The DOJ’s inaugural voting rights lawsuit is against North Carolina, and it makes clear what sorts of things the Voting Rights Section is going to prioritize: increasing voter suppression and indulging Republican conspiracy theories about voting. The lawsuit alleges that North Carolina violated HAVA by having a voter registration form that, while it asked for a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number, those fields appeared optional, but that information is required by federal law.
If you’re asking how, even if this is true, it harmed anyone’s right to vote, that’s because it absolutely did not. The theory here is that voters who did provide that information somehow had their vote diluted by the votes of someone who did not. Setting aside the fact that this is nonsense, it’s also really not applicable in North Carolina, where photo identification was required to vote in the 2024 election.
The DOJ’s theory here is nothing but a retread of GOP lawsuits filed in the run-up to the 2024 election. The Republican National Committee and the state GOP sued the North Carolina State Board of Elections in September 2024 to try to force the state to purge all voters who had failed to provide that information, even if they had been registered for decades.
North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin
That didn’t succeed, but it didn’t prevent failed state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin from trying the exact same thing in his bid to overturn the election victory of Justice Allison Riggs. Griffin didn’t succeed either, but that was before the GOP-dominated legislature changed the law so that the Board of Elections would be under GOP control.
There’s a depressing chance that the state will just agree to resolve the HAVA lawsuit by giving in to all the administration’s demands, because those demands are shared by the hardliners who now dominate the board.
In the past, voting rights lawsuits brought by the DOJ were over things like transparent voter suppression moves like mass purges of the voter rolls too close to an election, or refusing to provide voting material in Spanish. And even when George W. Bush’s Voting Rights Section was run by Hans von Spakovsky, who never met a voter suppression law he didn’t like, the DOJ still brought voting rights lawsuits about dilution of minority voting strength and disparate treatment of minority voters.
Note: You do not have to, under any circumstances, hand it to von Spakovsky or George W. Bush, particularly as the latter is who installed Chief Justice John Roberts, lifetime hater of voting rights. For these voting rights cases, you do have to hand it to career employees at the DOJ who managed to ram these cases through over opposition by partisan hacks, but now that 70% of the attorneys in the Civil Rights Division have quit since January, it’s likely that the only ones left standing are going to be the Trumpiest partisans imaginable.
They’d have to be pretty Trumpy to go along with the plans of Harmeet K. Dhillon, the new head of the Civil Rights Division, which houses the Voting Rights Section. Dhillon got the gig precisely because she has long worked to narrow voting rights and also supported Donald Trump’s conspiracies about the 2020 election. Dhillon is currently busy investigating Chicago for having a mayor who hires Black people while her boss, Bondi, is dropping actual legitimate voting rights cases brought during the Biden administration.
Related | DOJ uses its civil rights division to take aim at Chicago's diversity
What remains of the Voting Rights Section will now function to decrease access to the ballot, or the entire opposite of what the Voting Rights Act is about. It will also likely function to try to implement Trump’s nationwide voter suppression plan. Like every other part of the DOJ, the Voting Rights Section will no longer seek justice on behalf of the people. Instead, it will seek retribution on behalf of just one man: Trump.
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