DOJ serious about election integrity, could charge local officials who refuse to meet security standards
The Department of Justice, under President Donald Trump, is serious about election integrity in the U.S.
It has confirmed that local elections officials who refuse to meet required security standards could face charges.
Trump determined in an order weeks ago the U.S. lacks election security and called for enforcement of an existing ban on foreign nationals voting in federal elections.
According to a report at the Washington Examiner, he also ordered the attorney general and Homeland Security secretary to “prevent all noncitizens from being involved in the administration of any federal election.”
Now, DOJ spokesman Gates McGavick confirmed that, “The president’s executive order speaks for itself, and the Department of Justice will leave no option off the table when it comes to promoting free, fair, and secure elections.”
Charges against elections officials are rare, but analysts confirmed they could happen.
There was immediate pushback.
“The tactics we’re seeing out of DOJ right now are building on what we’ve seen from anti-democracy groups for years,” claimed Dax Goldstein, of the States United Democracy Center “They’re rooted in the same lies about elections, and they’re all meant to create noise and fear and concerns about issues with our elections that just don’t exist. Our elections are safe and secure, and election officials are working to keep them that way.”
All states claim their elections systems are secure, including Colorado. But that state was revealed to have posted pages of election system passwords online just ahead of the 2024 vote. Investigators gave Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold, under whose watch the passwords were posted, a pass.
Trump has claimed the 2020 vote was “rigged” and while exactly what “rigging” went on isn’t certain, there were several undue influences that are believed to have changed the results.
One was that Mark Zuckerberg handed out, through foundations, hundreds of millions of dollars to local elections officials who often used it to recruit voters in Democrat districts.
But probably larger was the impact from the FBI’s decision to interfere in the results by telling media corporations to ignore the stories about Biden family scandals detailed in the laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop, despite the fact the bureau knew the scandals were true.
Subsequent polling showed had that information been distributed generally to the voting public, enough voters would have withheld their support from Biden for him to lose.
“The New York Times reported that senior officials have directed DOJ lawyers to examine how a failure by state or local officials to follow security standards for electronic voting could be charged as a crime,” the report said.
The DOJ already has been contacting elections officials around the nation for details about their systems.