By any means necessary
Donald Trump and his loyal subjects mean to rig the 2026 elections by any means necessary.
Trump subjects both in the Justice Department’s civil rights division and criminal divisions are compiling a national voter database “to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally,” The New York Times reports (gift link):
“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school and a former Justice Department official.
The Justice Department has requested data from at least 16 Republican-controlled states, including Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. It has also sent more formal demands for data to at least 17 mostly Democrat-controlled or swing states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and New York.
Nearly every state has resisted turning over voter files with private, personally identifiable information on voters like driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers. Last week, a local judge blocked South Carolina from releasing private voter information to the Justice Department.
In particular, Trump’s subjects want to gather the last four digits of every voter’s social security number.
The administration plans to compare that voter data to a different database, maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, to see how many registered voters on the state lists match up with noncitizens listed by immigration agents, according to people familiar with the matter.
Except if our experience in North Carolina is any indication, any registrant in a blue county that lacks that number in their voter file — whether by data input error or because it’s not required under HAVA if the voter supplies a drivers license number — could have their votes challenged. This “election integrity” effort is not about rooting out noncitizens. That’s a pretext. (There’s a file drawer full of them in the West Wing.)
“The biggest structural concern is using this information in an irresponsible manner to fuel the narrative that something is amiss in any election in which the preferred outcome is not the actual outcome,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Election officials also note that creating a federal database has its own complications. A state’s voter file is not a static document; new voter registrations, changes in address, deaths and other adjustments to voter rolls take place every day. A federal database would be out of date a day after any voter list was turned over to federal officials.
The Trump administration deserves neither fealty nor any benefit of the doubt. If it wasn’t for bed faith, they wouldn’t have no faith at all.
* * * * *
Have you fought dicktatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense