Trump’s Dirty Tactic to Put Voter Rolls Under Federal Control in a Possible Bid to Disenfranchise Americans Who Don’t Vote MAGA

In Article I, Section 4, the Constitution gives state governments authority over federal elections, with a supervisory role for the U.S. Congress. The federal executive has no role at all. This has not stopped Donald Trump from attempting to place elections under his control. The latest news is that the administration put forward a secret agreement with Republican-led states to do this.

Stateline has a full report:

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent a confidential draft agreement to more than a dozen states that would require election officials to remove any alleged ineligible voters identified during a federal review of their voter rolls.

The agreement—called a memorandum of understanding, or MOU—would hand the federal government a major role in election administration, a responsibility that belongs to the states under the U.S. Constitution.

A Justice Department official identified 11 states that have expressed an interest in the agreement during a federal court hearing in December, according to a transcript reviewed by Stateline. Two additional states, Colorado and Wisconsin, have publicly rejected the memorandum of understanding and released copies of the proposal.

The 11 states “all fall into the list of, they have expressed with us a willingness to comply based on the represented MOU that we have sent them,” Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section, said at the hearing. He spoke at a Dec. 4 hearing in a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department against California, which has refused a demand for the state’s voter data.

Neff’s courtroom disclosure, which Stateline is the first to report, comes as the Justice Department has sued 21 states and the District of Columbia for unredacted copies of their voter rolls after demanding the data from most states in recent months. The unredacted lists include sensitive personal information, such as driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers.

This effort is concerning, not just because it violates the constitutional provision that puts voting laws under the control of state governments, but also because Trump administration officials have often repeated his fictitious claims about the 2020 election being “stolen”—even as Trump tried to steal that election by submitting slates of fake electors.

Donald Trump is a proven enemy of free and fair elections, and his administration’s takeover of state voter data is likely to undermine the integrity of our elections.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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