Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Democrats warned 10 states Friday that they may have violated federal election law after entering into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to share sensitive voter data.
In response, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, advised Democrats to “think twice before interfering in a federal investigation,” arguing that such actions could amount to obstruction of justice.
“Organizations should think twice before interfering in a federal investigation and encouraging the obstruction of justice,” Dhillon posted on social media. “Unless they’d like to join the dozens of states that are learning their lesson in federal court.”
In letters to election leaders in each of these states — which include Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah — Democratic National Committee (DNC) litigation director Daniel Freeman warned that entering into such an agreement “appears to require violations of the [National Voter Registration Act]” — most notably a provision that bars states from removing voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election.
For months the DOJ has sought sensitive voter data from every state — at first sending threatening letters demanding data, then escalating their campaign to a series of lawsuits to obtain access to state voter rolls. So far the DOJ has sued 23 states and Washington, D.C.
Amidst the DOJ’s hunt to obtain access to private voter data from every state, the department also sent each state a formal agreement — or a memorandum of understanding (MOU) — to share sensitive data from their individual voter rolls with the federal government. During a December court hearing tied to one of the department’s voter roll lawsuits, a DOJ attorney indicated that at least 11 states were in talks to sign the agreement to share voter data with the department.
Specifically, Freeman outlined that the DOJ’s MOU tells states who sign the agreement that they must remove any voters from their rolls within 45 days of receiving notice from DOJ of “issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns.”
That agreement, Freeman said, could violate the NVRA’s “notice and waiting provision” — which bars states from removing the names of registered voters who may have switched residences until those voters confirm an address change in writing — along with the “quiet period provision.”
It’s unclear at the moment if all of these states have actually signed an MOU with the DOJ, but at least eight states have voluntarily handed over access to their voter rolls to the DOJ — the latest being Texas.
See here for the background. Harmeet Dhillon’s thuggish “warning” is both par for the course with this administration and also the sort of thing that would have been a career-ending gaffe and an endless source of fodder for the op-ed pages once upon a time. I’d gladly read a daily lecture on civility and etiquette from George Will to get back to those times. That’s not going to happen, but this litigation might. How it ends I have no idea, but it’s a fight that needs to be engaged as well as a checklist item for the to-do list when we have a real government again. Axios and the Current have more.