In what may be one of the most comical situations in recent politics, the U.S. Department of Justice’s esteemed lawyers announced Monday that despite the extravagant and terrifying abuse of their investigative power under the Trump administration, they have so far been able to identify only 28 people in all of California who may have voted illegally.
“Today’s announcement by the United States DOJ emphasizes that there is no widespread voter fraud,” said California Atty. » declared General Rob Bonta after the press conference announcing the results of “Operation Protect the Vote”.
Twenty-eight people out of about 23 million registered voters in the state — and not all of them even tried to vote, according to the federal government. That’s about 1 in 820,000 people who would register or vote illegally, a rate that roughly matches the frequency with which Americans are struck by lightning in a given year.
So much for Trump’s incessant claims that there is a vast conspiracy between Democrats and undocumented immigrants to get them to vote in large numbers in order to steal the election. I want to emphasize here that none of the people indicted on Monday have been accused of collusion with each other or with Democratic overlords.
The full power of government – investigative, technological, legal – was deployed to track down these mysterious, diabolically intelligent election villains. And now, thanks to Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, and his colleagues across this great state, we now know that all 28 of them will be held accountable, if the government can prove wrongdoing. And let’s be clear: People who vote illegally should be held accountable.
But wait, there’s more, because this immigrant-led election-stealing plot certainly doesn’t stop at state lines. Seamus Hughes of Court Watch, an excellent site that tracks federal litigation, reported Monday that since the start of this administration, 169 people have been federally indicted for registering or voting illegally.
That number includes the new California cases, meaning 141 additional potentially illegal voters have been charged across the United States — in total, about 1 in 1.25 million registered voters are charged with registering or voting illegally, making this crime slightly less likely than guessing a six-digit PIN on the first try.
There. East. No. Election. Flight.
But that’s where the fun stops, because this attack on California’s elections is serious and has only just begun.
The federal government, you’ve probably read, is suing California, claiming it gave the state a thumb drive containing 20,000 names of registered voters who it strongly suspects may not be legal voters. Important note here: the government has been very careful not claiming that these people voted illegally, just that that could be the case based on questionable data, which I’ll get to in a minute.
The federal government gave the state a ridiculous 48 hours to agree to change constitutional law, abandon common sense, and sequester those 20,000 ballots, if they were even returned, to verify that they were cast by valid voters.
When California rightly refused – because elections are run by the states, not the federal government – the federal government sued on the flimsiest of legal grounds. He essentially claimed that voting illegally was illegal and that if California didn’t do exactly what Trump wanted, it could violate the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution by preventing the federal government from enforcing the crime of voter fraud.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney. Bill Essayli speaks at a news conference Monday where officials announced that 28 people in California have been charged with election fraud.
(David Butow / For Time)
Which is basically saying that if the state government fails to stop voter fraud using the flawed methods Trump likes, then the state is somehow preventing the feds from prosecuting voter fraud themselves. But didn’t they just apply it with 28 cases?
Get ready, because “state-facilitated voter fraud” is a new thing on the right.
California “is complicit in non-citizens voting in our elections, and as they were warned last week, not only is this a civil violation, but they could also face criminal consequences,” Essayli said, which, if that happened, would give a whole new meaning to the trumped-up charges.
Essayli said state officials were not “good faith actors,” but I would argue the situation is the opposite. The list of 20,000 alleged, suspected, maybe not illegal voters was probably taken from the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, created by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Effectiveness, if you remember that unfortunate relic.
It sought to pull data from more than a dozen government databases that not only were not compatible with such information sharing, but had until now been kept separate for privacy reasons. Americans in general did not want the government to collect unified and complete records on every citizen.
Luckily for us, I suppose, the SAVE system can’t actually create reliable, unified records. It confuses people, convolutes them, merges records of people with similar names, and in general has been deemed unreliable by data experts.
In September, the good people at UCLA’s Voting Rights Project joined with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights to sue the federal government for its use of this system to target naturalized citizens for removal from the voting rolls. It turns out that the government seems to be targeting immigrants who are now citizens with these accusations of voter fraud.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, naturalized citizens make up about 1 in 10 eligible voters, and nearly a quarter of them live in California. But they also live in swing states like Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed can attract such voters, and in other places like Georgia and Nevada, where elections could be decided by just a few votes.
These arrests and prosecutions while midterm voting is already underway are an unsubtle form of voter suppression. Imagine being a naturalized citizen in the Central Valley, where ICE is spreading fear and Republican David Valadao is running against Democrat Randy Villegas in California’s 22nd Congressional District — one of the most hotly contested races in the country.
Would you consider opting out of this election in case your ballot attracts the frightening attention of the federal government? Even knowing your vote is legal, what if you live in a mixed-status household? Would it be worth risking voting if it meant having to knock on the immigration door to check your status and perhaps find your missing family member?
Why take the risk?
“Basically what they’re doing now is just completely harassing and intimidating naturalized citizens who are legally eligible to vote through these actions,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the Voting Rights Project.
And if the vote isn’t suppressed enough to give Trump the results he wants, these lawsuits and lawsuits fuel the conspiracy beast, giving Trump fodder to claim the results are false and the election was stolen.
And we go around in circles, taking into account Trump’s claims that lightning strikes everyone, everywhere, all at once, because the vote didn’t go his way.
Gn usa
