Donald Trump has made false claims about voter fraud central to his political identity and issued a sweeping anti-voting executive order in March. Now he’s weaponizing the Justice Department to advance his voter suppression agenda.
On Tuesday, in its first major voting-related lawsuit, the Trump Justice Department sued the state of North Carolina over its voter rolls, reviving arguments that Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin used to try to throw out tens of thousands of ballots in an effort to overturn the victory of Democratic North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs.
“It’s no accident they’ve chosen a case in which the Republican candidate lost and they’re echoing his exact claims,” says Chiraag Bains, who served as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Joe Biden and as a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2010 to 2017.
The Justice Department claims that North Carolina violated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 by failing to collect voters’ driver’s license or Social Security numbers when they registered. Griffin challenged the eligibility of more than 60,000 voters who he claimed fell into that category, even though all of those voters showed identification when they cast a ballot and his legal team never presented a single instance of a someone voting improperly.
Nonetheless, the Trump Justice Department has now resurrected Griffin’s allegations, less than a month after a federal court shut down the GOP plot to steal the supreme court election and ordered the state board of elections to certify Riggs’ victory.
The DOJ lawsuit claims that the elections board “only took limited actions to prevent future violations from reoccurring” and should create a plan, within 30 days of a court order, “to remedy the demonstrated violations.”
