The Trump administration is waging war on voting rights using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations, and an executive order to limit voting by mail, moves mirroring the US president’s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials.
- +Experts alarmed as Trump launches broad-front attack on US voting rights
Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the DoJ, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the DoJ, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
The justice department has also filed lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from 30 states – even though, by law, states control elections – and the FBI has launched investigations into debunked allegations of voting fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin and a few other swing states that Trump lost in 2020.
Trump in late March this year issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed without evidence contribute to fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder.
The administration’s multi-pronged push to change voting rules is under way despite laws that empower states and Congress to set election rules, sparking lawsuits from states and nonpartisan voting rights groups.
In early April, for instance, officials from 23 Democratic states including California and Washington DC filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s executive order to curb voting by mail, arguing that the order was an unconstitutional effort to interfere with states’ administering their elections.
The administration’s aggressive steps to tighten voting rules come as Trump and many Republican allies have voiced strong fears that the November midterm elections are likely to give Democrats control of the House, and possibly the Senate too, limiting Trump’s powers and possibly leading to his impeachment again.
At a Republican House retreat in January, Trump stressed the stakes are high for his future if Democrats win control of the House. “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be … I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told lawmakers.
Former federal officials with voting expertise are sharply critical of the Trump administration’s moves to limit voting rights with phony charges of voting fraud.
“The Department of Justice has no authority to sweep up the voter rolls, which contain private information like drivers’ licenses and social security numbers, from every state in the nation,” Eileen O’Connor, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center who spent eight years in DoJ’s voting section of the civil rights division, told the Guardian.
“The department has 30 active lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to force the turnover of these sensitive records. So far, eight courts have issued rulings in these cases, and the DoJ has lost each one.”
O’Connor stressed that “lawsuits against the states are only one part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to interfere with elections. The administration has targeted election officials, attempted to rewrite election rules, pardoned January 6 rioters, and elevated election deniers.
“It has also raised the prospect of deploying federal immigration agents at polling sites – but federal law explicitly bans federal officers from interfering in elections and prohibits armed federal agents from being deployed anywhere an election is held.”
Other ex-election officials voice alarms about Trump’s moves to revamp voting rules and curb voting rights.
“Trump continues to falsely claim that voting by foreign nationals, which is illegal and rarely occurs, and practices such as mail-in voting resulted in a fraudulent election in 2020 and will result in the 2026 midterm elections being rigged against Republicans,” Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at the American University, told the Guardian. “However, numerous audits and lawsuits have failed to find any meaningful fraud in the 2020 election.”
Noble added: “Trump apparently believes that Democrats winning an election is proof enough that there was fraud because, as Trump has brazenly charged, “[I]f they didn’t cheat, they could not win … ”
Such criticism has not deterred Trump and top officials at the DoJ and other key agencies from claiming the voting changes and investigations they are pursuing are needed to combat what they falsely insist was widespread voting fraud in 2020. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche, for instance, told Fox News last month there was “a ton of evidence that the election was rigged” in 2020.
In a potential harbinger of voting fraud charges ahead in the fall elections if Trump doesn’t like the results, Trump quickly claimed that California’s early June primaries were rigged when Spencer Pratt, a Trump-backed mayoral candidate in Los Angeles, lost an early voting lead in the nation’s largest state, where final results often take longer to tabulate.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that it was “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had… 3rd World Nation.”
Further soon after the primaries were held Trump claimed without details that they were “under investigation by the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles”. The DoJ also sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles.
The DoJ’s heavy tilt to election denialism became palpable soon after Trump took office in 2025 as the department’s voting section in the civil rights division was revamped to align with Trump’s election denialist views and its staff was sharply reduced last year from about 30 lawyers to less than half that number, according to a former DoJ lawyer.
To implement Trump-backed changes in voting rules and curb voting rights, the DoJ has recruited a number of new lawyers whose resumes include efforts to fight Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden.
The justice department in April, for instance, tapped ex-Republican congressman Dan Bishop of North Carolina, an avid election denier in 2020 who had been serving as a US attorney in his state for just five months, to lead a national drive to ferret out voting fraud including debunked allegations from 2020.
In related moves, Democracy Docket disclosed in May that William Mohrman, a Minneapolis lawyer who was involved in lawsuits that sought to overturn Biden’s victory, had been hired as a senior counsel by the DoJ’s voting section, according to court filings.
Court documents show that Mohrman entered his first appearance on behalf of the government in a lawsuit seeking Georgia’s unredacted statewide voter registration records from 2020.
