Justice Department Protects Voters From Having Ballots Counted
The Justice Department marked Election Day by unveiling its most ambitious voting-rights initiative to date: protecting Americans from the emotional burden of having their ballots counted. After demanding that California separate mail ballots from roughly 20,000 voters the government suspects could be noncitizens, the department expanded its democracy-preservation campaign with warning letters, eleventh-hour lawsuits and nearly 1,000 federal monitors dispatched nationwide. Officials said nothing preserves local control like a federal law-enforcement agency arriving with lists of residents, urgent instructions and several theories it developed in the parking lot.
President Donald Trump praised the effort as a victory for ballot access, particularly access by authorities seeking to remove ballots. “Nobody has ever protected voting like we’re protecting it, because if a ballot looks bad, or maybe votes wrong, very suspiciously wrong, we protect everybody by making it disappear from the count,” Trump said. Administration officials clarified that the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to cast a ballot, while leaving its subsequent survival to the discretion of whichever federal attorney stayed latest at the office.
The department also intervened in Alaska’s Senate election to isolate ballots cast for a second candidate named Dan Sullivan, establishing a new legal doctrine under which voters may choose any candidate they want as long as the Justice Department approves the candidate’s name, biography and likely effect on the majority. Attorney General Pam Bondi described the operation as entirely nonpartisan, noting that investigators would scrutinize ballots from Democrats, suspected Democrats, people living near Democrats and anyone displaying an unusual attachment to arithmetic. Ballots favoring Republicans would undergo the same rigorous review and then be thanked for their service.
Federal judges blocked portions of the campaign, citing state authority, ballot secrecy, workable election procedures and the antiquated notion that poll workers should not be threatened by national law-enforcement officials during dinner. The department dismissed those concerns as judicial interference with the executive branch’s constitutional responsibility to invent election law several hours before polls close. Americans were therefore encouraged to vote confidently, secure in the knowledge that federal officials would protect every ballot by deciding whether it deserved to exist.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.