On Thursday evening, around the same time the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors in order to bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sued six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—for failing to hand over their full, unredacted voter registration lists. The new legal actions signify a ramping up of the Trump administration’s voter-suppression agenda in the wake of similar lawsuits the department filed last week against Maine and Oregon.

Thelawsuits may seem unrelated to Comey’s indictment, but both developments show how the DOJ has been weaponized in an unprecedented way to target Trump’s political opponents and retaliate against those who resist his extreme MAGA agenda.

The DOJ has demanded voter registration lists, which include sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers, from at least 27 states, and is reportedly attempting to build a national voter database, which has never been done before. This could endanger voter privacy and become a prime target for hackers, while the DOJ could abuse such a list to retaliate against voters based on party affiliation and promote Trump’s debunked claims of widespread voter fraud.

I explained the risks in a recent article:

In particular, the DOJ appears eager to share state voter data with the Department of Homeland Security, in orderto comb through federal immigration databases to search for cases of ineligible voting or noncitizens on the voter rolls. Such databases are not designed for those purposes and will likely produce inaccurate results, especially becausesuch fraud is also exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, this will give them an opportunity to trumpet fake claims of fraud in order to advance Trump’s lies about the voting process.

“My guess is they want the voter files to be able to say we have the voter files and we know there are x or y fraudulent people on it,” says Justin Levitt, who served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama. “It will be fiction, but now they’ll say it because they have them. Even if they find an infinitesimal number of wrong people on the rolls, they will lie about the numbers. This administration cannot be trusted. They have an enormous problem with credibility and an even bigger problem with data.”

Both red and blue states have resisted sharing their voter data with the Trump administration. A similar demand during Trump’s first term from his “election integrity” commission sparked a national outcry, but the responses this time have been more muted. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “few states have sent the DOJ their voter files, and those that did—at least 11—seem to have provided only the publicly available versions of their voter files.”

“The Justice Department’s demand for voters’ personal information, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers, is unprecedented and unlawful, and we will vigorously fight the federal government’s overreach in court,” Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state, said in a statement. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, called the DOJ lawsuit “a fishing expedition and pretext for partisan policy objectives.”

The demand for sensitive data is but one aspect of the Trump DOJ’s assault on voting rights. The department alsofiled a brief this week in a Louisiana redistricting case, urgingthe Supreme Court to dramatically gut the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

Under a court order, Louisiana drew a second majority-Black congressional district in advance of the 2024 election, which the Supreme Court allowed, despite legal challenges, at least for the time being. The state, which is about one-third Black, has six congressional districts. In its brief, the DOJ called the new map “a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” and urged the Court to make it far more difficult to draw districts that would allow voters of color to elect their candidates of choice, essentially dealing a death blow to the VRA. “Effectively, this is asking SCOTUS to gut the VRA without saying you are gutting the VRA,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, wrote on Bluesky.

The DOJ has already weaponized the VRA to boost Republican gerrymandering efforts. In early July, the department sent a letter to Texas alleging that four congressional districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited that letter as a justification for redrawing the state’s map this summer, on Trump’s orders, to give Republicans five more US House seats.

But in court documents filed this week, Texas threw the DOJ under the bus, denouncing its “ham-fisted legal conclusions,” which “apparently sought to provide political cover for Texas to engage in partisan redistricting.” The disavowal of the DOJ’s argument is particularly notable given how closely Texas worked with the Trump administration to redraw its map.

The partisan legal advocacy, meddling in state affairs, and similar actions by the DOJ have made it increasingly clear that the department, and the administration, intend to turn civil rights laws on their head, using them to target the very communities they were designed to protect.

This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.

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^{Chris Stein (The Guardian)}