Justice Department Protects Democracy From Registered Voters

Justice Department lawyers moved to protect California elections from the state’s most dangerous undocumented population: registered voters whose names appeared on a federal spreadsheet. The department sued after identifying roughly 20,000 people it described as “likely” noncitizens and demanded that election officials segregate their ballots until they could prove themselves innocent of voting while insufficiently documented. An outside review found that more than 40% of the names were not even on California’s voter rolls, confirming the list’s exceptional security standards: thousands of the alleged illegal voters had already been prevented from participating by not being registered in the first place.

Federal courts rejected the administration’s emergency attempt to quarantine the ballots, insisting that evidence, election law and eligible voters remain inconveniently involved in elections. President Donald Trump praised the initiative as a landmark expansion of due process. “California has millions and millions of ballots, very suspicious ballots, and they arrive in envelopes without passports, without birth certificates, sometimes without even beautiful American stamps,” Trump said. “We’re simply saying every ballot is guilty until the voter proves it was born here, which is how freedom has always worked.” Administration officials said the policy would restore confidence among Americans who distrust election results unless those results are first approved by the administration.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta objected that the federal government was attempting to interfere with voting ahead of the November 3 midterms. Secretary of State Shirley Weber defended the obsolete presumption that registered voters should not lose their ballots merely because their names resemble entries on an error-riddled list. The Justice Department also warned election officials that counting flagged ballots could invite criminal scrutiny, reassuring local administrators that they remain completely free to run elections so long as they choose Washington’s preferred outcome. Officials emphasized that no eligible voter would be disenfranchised; the voter’s ballot would merely be detained without charges until federal authorities felt democracy had become safe enough to count it. In the United States, citizenship is now presumed only after a ballot survives government suspicion.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.