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Attorney Merrick Garland announced Friday that the Department of Justice will expand its resources to protect voting rights and focus on ongoing efforts to discredit election results in 2020. The move has come while President Donald Trumps Big Lie continues to issue calls for recounts in states that have certainly lost and pushed the GOP to dramatically restrict ballot access in state legislatures across the country.
To meet the challenge at the present moment, we must rededicate the resources of the Department of Justice to a critical part of its original mission: Enforcing federal law to protect the franchise of all eligible voters, he said. by Garland on Friday as he announced plans to double the number of DOJ officials discussed on protecting voting rights.
Republicans across the country have taken a sledgehammer on Americans to access the vote in the wake of Trumps ’loss, issuing so-called security bills aimed at mailing voting and other initiatives that make it easier for people to vote. This year, for example, Republican lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills proposing restrictions such as limiting early voting hours and even banning the distribution of food and drink to voters waiting in line. . Democrats argued such barriers could hurt turnout. The Brennan Center for Justice’s latest analysis of state voting laws at the NYU School of Law found that 14 states have passed 24 laws restricting access to voting, a number that is likely to rise due to a dozen other drastic bills are still pending in another 18 states, the Atlantic report.
Garland said the Justice Department has expanded the team of trial lawyers to review so many stringent voting bills passed across the country. They will pay particular attention to possible discrimination against people of color and enforce the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, according to the Washington Post. Where we see violations, we will not hesitate to act, Garland promised.
In addition to opposing GOP -led voter suppression efforts called by civil rights groups and Democrats under President Joe Bidens to draw a harder line against what Garland said the unit of voting rights will oversee post-election ballot audits, which pro-Trump Republicans are conducting in an attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Election audits are intended to ensure that votes are counted correctly or appropriately followed election procedures, or both, and may include procedures such as hand recounts and checking voter signatures on ballot envelopes that are absent. Garland’s new priority reflects the extent to which false claims of election fraud continue to threaten democracy.
One such obvious partisan effort is taking place in Arizonas largest province, Maricopa, which narrowly went to Biden in November. A company with no experience auditing elections and which is run by a pro-Trump fraud conspiracy theorist is conducting the audit, CNN reports. There is also a lack of basis for such an analysis: County election officials have already conducted two audits and found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and other issues that Trump has accused. The opaque and seemingly inefficient audit procedures began with transparency concerns among election experts.
Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming lawmaker who was recently ousted as chair of the House GOP conference for not following Trump’s lies, fueled concerns last week. He hailed the Arizona effort as an effort to overthrow democracy. The Rep. Adam Kinzinger, another anti-Trump Republican, echoed Cheneys ’stance in a subsequent tweet.
As my colleague Eric Lutz noted last month, the absurd effort in Arizona offers a sort of blueprint for other GOP-led lawmakers. CNN reported that analysis of the 2020 election is currently underway in Georgia and New Hampshire. Pennsylvania may be next, but the GOP there is split. Some of the state’s Republican lawmakers recently toured the audit site in Arizona, while others shot the prospect of such an audit. “I don’t know why you want to repeat what’s happening in Arizona anywhere across the country,” said Al Schmidt, Philadelphia city commissioner.
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