Feds withhold $200m to force states to purge voters
The DOJ threatened all 50 states with prosecution over voter rolls, days after federal agents killed two citizens in Minneapolis.
The US Justice Department threatened election officials in all 50 states with criminal prosecution last week as feds withhold voter roll data, the same federal machine that killed two American citizens in Minneapolis’s streets this year.
Renée Nicole Macklin Good, 37, was shot dead in her car by an ICE agent on 7 January. Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, a Veterans Affairs nurse, was shot dead by two CBP officers on 24 January while filming agents and shielding a woman who had been knocked to the ground. Julio César Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan man, was shot in the leg inside a home in front of two children on 14 January. The ICE agent involved, Christian Castro, has since been charged with four counts of assault after city video contradicted his department’s account.
That is the record of the agencies now aimed at the ballot box. On 7 July, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general running the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote to election officials in every state and Washington DC warning they “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” federal law if they knowingly keep non-citizens on the voter rolls. States were given five days to explain themselves.
The same week, FEMA moved to withhold 20% of a $1.064bn Homeland Security Grant Program, more than $200m earmarked for counter-terrorism, until states agree to switch to hand-marked paper ballots, run 5% manual audits, and citizenship-check every registered voter and poll worker within 120 days.
Non-citizen voting is a crime and vanishingly rare. State officials say the department has produced no evidence of it. Oregon’s Secretary of State, Tobias Read, called the letters threats “with no evidence to back up their fever dreams.” Arizona’s Adrian Fontes said his office would keep “following Arizona law, not directions that come from political rhetoric or intimidation.” David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation put it plainly: “If you really thought they committed a crime, you wouldn’t be sending them a letter. You’d be bringing criminal indictments.”
Federal courts have already blocked parts of this campaign more than ten times, including a March executive order that would have built a federal voter list and an approved-mail-voter list, struck down by a district judge as unconstitutional. The guardrails are holding, for now. What has not been struck down is a president who told Reuters in January, without correction from his own department, “we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Running a federal election is not the president’s power. It belongs to the states and to Congress. Four months out, the administration is testing how far it can lean on both, with a counter-terrorism fund as the price of admission.
