Garland Announces DOJ Campaign Against Voter Integrity Laws

Garland pledged to fight voter fraud, but he repeated the tired line that 2020 election integrity concerns had been “refuted.”

“As part of its mission to protect the right to vote, the Justice Department will, of course, do everything in its power to prevent election fraud and if found, to vigorously prosecute it,” the attorney general pledged. “But many of the justifications proffered in support of these post-election audits and restrictions on voting have relied on assertions of material vote fraud in the 2020 election that have been refuted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both this administration and the previous one, as well as by every court, federal and state, that has considered them.”

While law enforcement and intelligence agencies declared that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, that does not amount to a refutation of election integrity concerns. In fact, Time Magazine published an astonishing story about a “cabal” and a “shadow campaign” that pulled the levers behind the scenes in the 2020 election. While the article claims these efforts aimed at preserving a free and fair election, organizations like the Center for Tech and Civic Life funneled money into blue areas of the country, boosting turnout that helped Biden prevail.

Across the country, officials loosened voter safeguards in the name of allowing people to vote amid a pandemic. The election integrity laws in various states represent efforts to ensure that only legal voters vote, to restore the status quo pre-pandemic, and to prevent the kind of “shadow campaign” Time exposed.

Yet Garland echoed the racialist rhetoric of Biden in announcing his effort to combat these laws.

“We are scrutinizing new laws that seek to curb voter access, and where we see violations, we will not hesitate to act,” Garland said, The Hill reported. “We are also scrutinizing current laws and practices in order to determine whether they discriminate against Black voters and other voters of color.”

The attorney general pledged that the DOJ would double the number of attorneys working on voting rights issues in the next 30 days. (Trump had left the department with 15 voting rights lawyers, about half the number under Obama.)

Contrary to Garland’s suggestions, voting integrity laws aim at restoring confidence in elections, not undermining it. The 2020 election involved a great deal of irregularities, from ballot drop-boxes with insecure chains of custody to the widespread mailing of mail-in ballots using outdated voter lists. Efforts to secure ballots from potential fraud are not based on disinformation or racism, but on legitimate concerns.

Yet it seems the Biden administration is intent on not just using baseless hyperbole to condemn election integrity efforts, but on weaponizing the DOJ to find pretexts to declare election-integrity measures illegal.