Category Archives: fraudulent fraud squad

“Justice Department will switch its focus on voting and prioritize Trump’s elections order, memo says”

Department of Justice, fraudulent fraud squad, Voting Rights Act

Missed this Nick Riccardi AP story from the other day:

The Justice Department unit that ensures compliance with voting rights laws will switch its focus to investigating voter fraud and ensuring elections are not marred by “suspicion,” according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The new mission statement for the voting section makes a passing reference to the historic Voting Rights Act, but no mention of typical enforcement of the provision through protecting people’s right to cast ballots or ensuring that lines for legislative maps do not divide voters by race. Instead, it redefines the unit’s mission around conspiracy theories pushed by Republican President Donald Trump to explain away his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election….

“The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion,” the mission statement declares.

It adds that the unit will “vigorously enforce” Trump’s executive order seeking to reshape how elections are run. Parts of that order have been put on hold by a judge….

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“What to know about push in Shasta County to override voter ID, election laws in California”

fraudulent fraud squad, The Voting Wars

Record Searchlight:

A citizens group whose leaders have been at the forefront of unverified claims of local election fraud are leaning heavily on Shasta’s status as a charter county in their attempt to change its voting rules.

“Save Shasta Elections” started collecting signatures for a measure to require single-day, in-person voting with limited access to absentee ballots, voter identification and hand-counted ballots.

The group argues that because Shasta is a charter county its laws, including elections, supersede state law. Voters approved a ballot measure last November that made Shasta a charter county. It is among 15 counties in California that govern by charter.

“Shasta County has a unique opportunity as a charter law county to create and follow rules locally,” the group states in its notice to circulate a petition to get the charter amendment on the ballot.

But some raise serious legal questions whether the county has the power to pass voter laws that run counter to state laws….

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“Elections expert says DOGE’s 57 potential voter registration fraud referrals are ‘a drop in the ocean'”

fraudulent fraud squad

Ryan Reilly for NBC News:

Election law expert Rick Hasen told NBC News on Thursday that the 57 referrals that DOGE reportedly made to the Justice Department involving resident aliens who were allegedly registered to vote are a “drop in the ocean,” and noted that potential unlawful voter registrations were different from ballots being cast.

As NBC News reported this morning, longtime Elon Musk advisor Antonio Gracias told reporters that DOGE has referred 57 cases of voter fraud to the Justice Department, saying the individuals referred were “resident aliens who were registered to vote and may or may not have voted in elections.”

“We’re not sure,” Gracias said. “We referred the cases.”…

More than 155 million votes were cast in the 2024 election, and Hasen said that individuals sometimes inadvertently get registered to vote who are not eligible, sometimes during visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles, since some states give voters a registration opportunity when they sign up for or renew their driver’s license.

“Sometimes either a worker at the motor vehicles department or the person looking at one of those little screens hits the wrong button, makes a mistake, and inadvertently gets registered to vote. So those things happen,” he said.

Hasen said there are “very rare cases” of non-citizens who attempt to vote, and that it makes sense that so few non-citizens knowingly attempt to cast unlawful ballots because there’s no concrete benefit to casting a single vote and the penalties are so dire.

“Very few cases are found, and the reason for that is unsurprising. If you’re not a citizen and you register to vote and you vote intentionally, that could affect your immigration status, you could go to jail,” he said. “People sign under penalty of perjury when they do these things that they are eligible to vote, and given that one vote is very unlikely to change the outcome of an election, there’s very little incentive to risk breaking the law.”

“So you know, this is like a drop in the ocean, and it would not surprise me if, after we look at these 57 cases, that there are none or few people who are ineligible, who intentionally and affirmatively try to register to vote, right? And even so, 57 people out of how many, how many 10s of millions of people in this database?”…

“If this is the best that DOGE and the Trump administration can do in ferreting out voter fraud, there are not going to be any more effective this time around than they were during Trump 1,” he said….

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“Trump’s Elections Power Play and the Voting Machines”

chicanery, election administration, election subversion risk, fraudulent fraud squad

Bob Bauer at Executive Functions:

On March 25, President Trump issued a sprawling executive order on Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections. The order focuses on the “integrity” of federal elections. It repeats but does not substantiate Trump’s claims that our elections are rife with fraud, including extensive noncitizen voting. The order appears to be setting the foundation for presidential intervention in the administration of elections in 2026 (and beyond). And it does so in a plainly unlawful way by supplanting the states’ constitutional authority to regulate the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections except where Congress elects to prescribe its own rules for federal elections. The Constitution does not confer on the president any share in this rule-setting authority. Already 19 states and other plaintiffs have filed suits to challenge the order’s constitutionality.

This first in a series of posts on Trump’s voting executive order focuses on one of the likely points of attack in Trump’s elections strategy: refreshing claims from 2020 about rigged or faulty voting machines and providing him with a new argument for seizing these machines in 2026.

And it concludes:

To read this executive order as evidence of planning for an attack on the 2026 elections is not to indulge in undue alarmism. The history, context, and express terms behind this order justify concern. In any event, I have hoped to provide enough on which readers may reach their own conclusions.

This much is clear: Trump does not accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election, as he restated again in his Easter message wishes to, among others, “all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election.” Trump continues to insist that he was the victim of fraud and that the voting system, including the machinery in use throughout the country, remains susceptible to rigging yet again. He tried four years ago to do something about it in a bid to remain in office. He failed because the lawyers and officials then in place in the White House and key departments and agencies stood in his way. It is far from clear that this time there is anyone there to take that stand.

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“How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives”

chicanery, fraudulent fraud squad

NPR:

One of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency lieutenants working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing dubious claims about noncitizens voting, apparently using access to data that court records suggest DOGE isn’t supposed to have.

The staffer, Antonio Gracias, made the claims as part of larger misleading statements about the SSA’s enumeration-beyond-entry, or EBE program, which streamlines the process for granting Social Security cards to certain categories of eligible immigrants.

Gracias said in an April 2 appearance on Fox and Friends that “5-plus million” noncitizens who “came to the country as illegals” received Social Security numbers “through an automatic system” and proceeded to “get into our benefit systems.”

And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls. And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted,” Gracias said.

State-level audits of voter data have found few examples of noncitizens voting, which is a federal crime punishable with prison and deportation.

Later that week, Gracias furthered his claims on a podcast. “I think this was a move to import voters,” he said, echoing a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump and Musk elevated during the 2024 campaign season and Republican lawmakers are invoking to push for stricter voting policies.

Using Social Security data to imply that noncitizens are breaking the law also could have violated a court order that prevents DOGE staffers from handling sensitive SSA systems.

It’s the latest example of concerns among privacy activists that DOGE’s sweeping access to personal and financial information of millions of Americans may violate privacy laws and may be used for inappropriate purposes….While Musk and some Republican lawmakers are now amplifying Gracias’ claims online, experts familiar with Social Security say Gracias is mischaracterizing the program, and voter registration experts say they doubt the accuracy of his claims about noncitizens voting.

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“Trump Wants Mail Votes to Arrive By Election Day. Red States Are Rushing to Toe the Line.”

absentee ballots, election administration, fraudulent fraud squad

Bolts:

Frustrated by slowing mail delivery, particularly in rural areas, the Kansas legislature in 2017 passed a law to let elections officials count mail ballots that arrived after Election Day, for up to three extra days, so long as the ballots were postmarked before polls closed. Kansas politicos joined other states with such a policy in calling this a “grace period.” 

“Because that’s exactly what it was,” Jamie Shew, the clerk and top elections official in Douglas County, home to the city of Lawrence, told Bolts last week. “It was providing some grace for someone who did what they were supposed to do. We wanted to make sure those ballots counted.”

The reform drew zero committee testimony in opposition. Lawmakers voted 163-1 for it. Even Kansas’ then-secretary of state, Republican Kris Kobach, a longtime champion of voter restrictions who that same year helped run President Trump’s commission to investigate election fraud, wrote a letter of support: Kansans voting by mail need a little wiggle room, he told lawmakers, as a result of the U.S. Postal Service reducing processing sites in the state.

“There was universal acceptance because it just made sense,” said Shew, who helped draft the legislation and is now in his third decade as county clerk. 

This was a popular line of thought around the country, and by the 2020 election nearly half of U.S. states—blue, red, and swing alike—had adopted their own grace-period laws. 

Fast forward to this year: Republican politicians nationwide now can’t stand grace periods. 

This past March alone brought news that two states—Kansas among them—will repeal their grace periods; that conservative federal judges are on the brink of killing grace periods in two other states; and that Trump, who for years has falsely alleged rampant mail-voting fraud, wants to pressure the rest of the nation to reject every mail ballot that arrives after polls close. 

In Kansas, the Republicans who control the statehouse passed a bill this spring to end the grace period they’d created in 2017. In elections starting in 2026, any mail ballot received after 7 p.m. on Election Day will be tossed, even if it was postmarked in time.

Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, but Republicans had enough votes to override her. The bill, Kelly wrote in a veto letter, would “disenfranchise thousands of Kansas voters,” and constitutes “an attack” on rural voters because mail service is often slower for them than for people in cities.

Utah Republicans adopted a similar change just two weeks before Kansas, ending their state’s grace period amid a broad crackdown on mail voting. West Virginia is considering a bill to join them. …

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“Former Wisconsin justice to give up law license over 2020 election review”

chicanery, fraudulent fraud squad

WaPo:

A former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice agreed Monday to give up his law license for three years after facing a string of ethics allegations stemming from his error-riddled review of the 2020 election for Republican state lawmakers.

In a filing with the state Supreme Court, former justice Michael Gableman conceded that legal regulators had produced enough evidence to find he had violated state ethics rules for lawyers. He gave up his legal fight over the matter a week after a candidate backed by Democrats won a seat on the state’s high court and locked in a likely liberal majority for years.

In a 10-count complaint in November, Wisconsin’s Office of Lawyer Regulation alleged Gableman had filed false information with a judge, repeatedly engaged in dishonesty, unfairly disparaged a judge and an attorney, failed to perform competent legal work, did not follow the directions of his client, released confidential information and lied to the lawyer who investigated him.

Gableman on Monday said he would no longer contest the complaint and would agree to have his law license suspended for three years. The state Supreme Court will have the final say on whether to suspend his license…..

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“Now Musk Is Boosting Claims Wisconsin Supreme Court Election Was ‘Stolen’

fraudulent fraud squad

Daily Beast:

Here we go again.

After initially trying to downplay his candidate’s loss in the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race, Elon Musk has now boosted a post on his social media platform X claiming there was “overwhelming” evidence the election was “stolen.”…

Now, Musk has responded to a post by disgraced Infowars founder Alex Jones interviewing MAGA’s original election denier Roger Stone, who claimed, “The numbers don’t just add up” in the Wisconsin race.

“Hmm,” Musk replied to the post.

During the 10-minute interview, Stone tried to argue that, based on the turnout of previous election cycles, “The fraud was baked in in the mail-in votes.” He also questioned the likelihood of Wisconsin voters passing a voter ID law while also electing a liberal judge—even though voter ID laws enjoy broad bipartisan support, according to the Pew Research Center…..

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My New One at MSNBC Opinion: “Trump’s executive order on elections is a blatant power grab; It seems especially dangerous to take power away from the states when there are many threats to our democracy.”

authoritarian threats in US, election administration, Election Assistance Commission, fraudulent fraud squad, The Voting Wars

I have written this piece for MSNBC Opinion. It begins:

By design, presidents have no power over the conduct of federal elections. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on election administration aims to flip that, trying to take power from both an independent bipartisan federal agency and from the states, in an affront to principles of federalism. This dangerous power grab signals further democratic backsliding….

After the disputed 2000 election, Congress used those powers to pass the Help America Vote Act which, among other things, established the United States Election Assistance Commission: a federal agency that approves voting technologies eligible for federal subsidies and advises states and counties on best practices. The EAC is described as “independent” in the congressional statute; it has four members, no more than two from any single political party, and it takes three commissioners to approve anything. The design is meant to be bipartisan and independent of political branches, insulating the agency from some politics.

Trump’s executive order tries to turn that around. It purports to direct the EAC to do certain things such as require documentary proof of citizenship on a form that the federal government provides to allow people to register to vote anywhere in the United States for federal elections.

Requiring documentary proof of citizenship to be allowed to register to vote is currently under debate both in Congress and in the states (Arizona has such rules, though they are tied up in litigation). Whether a documentary requirement is a good idea — and I think it is a bad idea, because it could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters and prevent only a tiny amount of fraud — the issue is up to the states and Congress, not to the president.

It’s dangerous to put such power in the hands of the president, who could attempt to manipulate election rules to favor his party and his self-interest. And it seems especially dangerous to take power away from the states when there are many threats to our democracy….

Republicans seemed to understand this point in the past. When Joe Biden was president, he issued his own executive order on voting. The order was a mild one, asking federal agencies to promote voter access and voter registration. Yet Republicans were outraged. Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the chair of the House Administration Committee, issued a press release calling the order “another attempt by the Biden Administration to tilt the scales ahead of 2024.” Then-West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner dismissed the order as “federal overreach.”

If that order was an overreach, what Trump is trying to do now risks dislocating his proverbial arm from its socket. Not only does the executive order try to direct the independent EAC to take certain action, it also directs the attorney general to sue states that accept and count ballots that are mailed before Election Day but arrive after that day. And it purports to give the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency the power to subpoena voter registration records from states in a silly hunt for elusive voter fraud. 

In the first Trump administration, an advisory commission on “election integrity” chaired by Vice President Mike Pence tried to go after similar voting records. Pence and the commission got pushback from both Democrats and Republicans. One GOP official who refused to hand over such records was Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann. “As all of you may remember, I fought in federal court to protect Mississippi voters’ rights for their privacy and won,” he said in 2017. “In the event I were to receive correspondence from the commission requesting (what the other state received) … My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

 I hope Republican officials have a similar response this time around — minus the reference to the “Gulf of Mexico” of course….

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“Catalysts of Insurrection: How White Racial Antipathy Influenced Beliefs of Voter Fraud and Support for the January 6th Insurrection”

fraudulent fraud squad

Tye Rush, Chelsea Jones, Michael Herndon, and Matt Barreto have written this article for the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics. Here is the abstract:

On January 6, 2021, the belief that voter fraud was to blame for Trump’s 2020 loss led thousands of people to storm the Capitol during election certification, aiming to occupy it by force to stop this process. While only thousands participated, millions more voiced their support for the insurrection, and this begs the question: What explains perceptions of voter fraud and support for the January 6 insurrection? Recent studies establish that White conservatives are more likely to believe that voter fraud is a rampant problem, linking these perceptions to state efforts to expand access to voting systems where racial minority groups stand to gain equality. Using a combination of pre-election, post-election, and post-insurrection survey data, we examine the link between White racial attitudes and perceptions of voter fraud and views toward the insurrection. We argue that White racial attitudes are pivotal in explaining the perceptions of voter fraud that led to the January 6 insurrection. We find that White Americans with a bias for their own racial in-group over racial out-groups are likelier to doubt the election results after Donald Trump was declared the loser, though not before. We find these same attitudes are statistically associated with sympathy for the insurrection and insurrectionists.

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Department of Insanity (and Inanity): “Warner, Who Said CIA Stole Election, Now Leads DOJ Civil Rights”

chicanery, Department of Justice, fraudulent fraud squad

Bloomberg Law:

The Justice Department has inserted Mac Warner, who last year espoused false claims that the CIA stole Trump’s 2020 presidential victory with the FBI’s help, to run the civil rights division, replacing an ousted career official who’s started reporting to the new sanctuary cities office.

Warner, West Virginia’s former secretary of state, embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election while running in the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary.

Warner told DOJ civil rights staff Monday that he’s assumed control of the division, according to an email obtained by Bloomberg Law. He’ll function as the top official until Harmeet Dhillon, another 2020 election denier who Trump selected to lead the anti-discrimination enforcement office, wins Senate confirmation.

Warner’s oversight of a division bracing for a dramatic shift in priorities, coincides with former acting head Kathleen Wolfe’s departure to a DOJ sanctuary cities initiative that she and three other career civil rights supervisors were forced by the Trump administration to accept if they wanted to keep their jobs.

In 2017, when Warner, a former US Army attorney, previously began a new leadership role—his first of two terms as West Virginia’s chief elections officer—he quickly fired 16 employees. His dismissals of mostly registered Democrats ended up costing state taxpayers more than $3 million in wrongful termination settlements.

Warner is now joined in the civil rights front office by Michael Gates, a Trump loyalist who’s spent the past decade as the elected city attorney for Huntington Beach, California. Gates, like Warner, has battled Democrats on voter identification and other election policies. He’s serving as the deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, Warner’s Monday email said.

The division’s voting section has jurisdiction over suing states and localities for racially discriminatory election laws. It also conducts investigations of hate crimes and police misconduct, and is expected to take the lead in advancing the Trump administration’s efforts to curb diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

We’ve covered Warner on ELB before, such as this and this.

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“NC elections officials seek to fast-track state Supreme Court race battle”

fraudulent fraud squad, judicial elections

WRAL:

The North Carolina Board of Elections asked the state Supreme Court to use its power to bypass the state Court of Appeals and take up Republican Jefferson Griffin’s election challenge — a case that could determine whether Griffin wins a seat on the high court.

Griffin, currently a state appeals judge, finished the November general election more than 700 votes behind Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs. The slim margin was upheld by two statewide recounts, but the result hasn’t been certified while Griffin challenges the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters….

A Feb. 7 hearing in Wake County Superior Court resulted in a ruling in the election board’s favor, denying Griffin’s request to throw out the challenged votes. Griffin has appealed that ruling.

In its petition to the Supreme Court, the state elections board says the case raises legal issues of “exceptional public importance,” and should be settled as soon as possible….

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“Musk-linked group offered $5m for proof of voter fraud – and came up with nothing”

fraudulent fraud squad

Brendan Fischer and Emma Steiner in The Guardian:

In May 2024, a flashy ad went viral on social media warning that “across the country, there are real cases of fraud and abuses of the [election] system that have eroded our trust”. The ad pledged that “whistleblowers” who shared evidence of election fraud “will be rewarded with payment from our $5m fund”.

This reward was courtesy of a just-announced group, the Fair Election Fund, which has deep connections to Elon Musk’s political network, according to materials obtained by Documented.

The Fair Election Fund pledged that “the bulk of the group’s budget will be devoted to paying whistleblowers” for sharing their stories, and that it would launch “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns” that would “highlight these cases”.

It was followed by another ad that ran in swing states during the Olympics and told viewers “you could be eligible for compensation” for sharing evidence of election fraud.

Despite the group’s high-profile, deep-pocketed backers and lucrative bounty offers, it never revealed any evidence of voter or election fraud. Instead, the group took a series of unrelated detours into tangential areas like third-party ballot access, and its effort to uncover fraud reaffirmed what numerous studies, court rulings and bipartisan investigations have concluded: voter fraud is extremely rare.

The lack of evidence has not stopped Republicans in Congress and state legislatures from continuing to push restrictive voting laws aimed at addressing this phantom threat. Meanwhile, Musk is claiming that “fraud” justifies his efforts to slash government operations, but similarly has not revealed much evidence.

The Fair Election Fund has now gone radio silent. Sitemap data shows that the website has not been updated since October, and the X/Twitter account for the group has not posted since November. The group’s spokesperson, former representative Doug Collins, became Trump’s veterans affairs secretary, and is now also leading the office of government ethics….

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“Former Sheriff Hayden investigated Johnson County’s top election official, records show”

fraudulent fraud squad

KC Star:

Former Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden investigated Johnson County Election Commissioner Fred Sherman over allegations of voter intimidation, according to records obtained by The Star. The case was the only one Hayden, a Republican, ever sent to Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe during his years-long investigation into election fraud. The inquiry never found any election fraud but helped stoke baseless conspiracy theories that the county’s elections were somehow tainted.

The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, now led by Democrat Byron Roberson, and Howe, a Republican, both confirmed in separate statements last week that Hayden had submitted only one election-related case. Roberson announced last week that he had formally closed the election inquiry. But law enforcement documents provided to The Star in response to a records request now reveal Sherman was the subject of the intimidation investigation. The documents illustrate the extraordinary situation that played out in Johnson County in 2022 as the then-sheriff investigated the county’s top elections official. Howe declined to prosecute Sherman, finding no evidence of a crime….

The records provided on Tuesday include a full narrative report of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office investigation. While the victim’s name is redacted in the newly-provided documents, the case number matches the partial report previously provided to The Star. In the narrative, Det. Kevin Cronister wrote that the alleged victim in an email alleged that during a July 13, 2022, election worker training, Sherman was disregarding her “beliefs as an American voter and election worker” because Sherman had told her she needed to vote in advance or by mail to be a poll worker on Election Day. The alleged victim said she only believed in voting in-person on Election Day. “Having been required by Fred Sherman to choose between my voting rights and his policy, I felt stripped of my rights,” the alleged victim said, according to Cronister’s narrative report….

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