{"id":214064,"date":"2026-06-17T01:49:25","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T01:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/experts-alarmed-as-trump-launches-broad-front-attack-on-us-voting-rights-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T01:49:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T01:49:25","slug":"experts-alarmed-as-trump-launches-broad-front-attack-on-us-voting-rights-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/experts-alarmed-as-trump-launches-broad-front-attack-on-us-voting-rights-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts alarmed as Trump launches broad-front attack on US voting rights – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

With election denialists installed in key positions, officials using series of measures to change voting rules
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\u2019s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials.
Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the Department of Justice, 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 \u2013 even though, by law, states control elections \u2013 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\u2019s 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 non-partisan voting rights groups.
In early April, for instance, officials from 23 Democratic states including California and Washington DC filed a lawsuit to block Trump\u2019s executive order to curb voting by mail, arguing that the order was an unconstitutional effort to interfere with states administering their elections.
The administration\u2019s 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\u2019s powers and possibly leading to his impeachment again.
At a Republican House retreat in January, Trump stressed the stakes were high for his future if Democrats win control of the House. \u201cYou gotta win the midterms, because if we don\u2019t win the midterms, it\u2019s just gonna be \u2026 I mean, they\u2019ll find a reason to impeach me,\u201d Trump told lawmakers.
Former federal officials with voting expertise are sharply critical of the Trump administration\u2019s moves to limit voting rights with phoney charges of voting fraud.
\u201cThe Department of Justice has no authority to sweep up the voter rolls, which contain private information like driver\u2019s licenses and social security numbers, from every state in the nation,\u201d Eileen O\u2019Connor, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center who spent eight years in the justice department\u2019s voting section of the civil rights division, told the Guardian.
\u201cThe 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.\u201d
O\u2019Connor stressed that \u201clawsuits 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.
\u201cIt has also raised the prospect of deploying federal immigration agents at polling sites \u2013 but federal law explicitly bans federal officers from interfering in elections and prohibits armed federal agents from being deployed anywhere an election is held.\u201d
Other ex-election officials voice alarms about Trump\u2019s moves to revamp voting rules and curb voting rights.
\u201cTrump 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,\u201d Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at the American University, told the Guardian. \u201cHowever, numerous audits and lawsuits have failed to find any meaningful fraud in the 2020 election.\u201d
Noble added: \u201cTrump apparently believes that Democrats winning an election is proof enough that there was fraud because, as Trump has brazenly charged, \u201c[I]f they didn\u2019t cheat, they could not win \u2026\u201d
Such criticism has not deterred Trump and top officials at the justice department 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. The acting attorney general Todd Blanche, for instance, told Fox News last month there was \u201ca ton of evidence that the election was rigged\u201d in 2020.
In a potential harbinger of voting fraud charges ahead in the fall elections if Trump doesn\u2019t like the results, Trump quickly claimed that California\u2019s early June primaries were rigged when Spencer Pratt, a Trump-backed mayoral candidate in Los Angeles, lost an early voting lead in the nation\u2019s largest state, where final results often take longer to tabulate.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that it was \u201cNot possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had\u2026 3rd World Nation.\u201d
Further, soon after the primaries were held Trump claimed without details that they were \u201cunder investigation by the US attorney\u2019s office in Los Angeles\u201d. The justice department also sent a federal prosecutor<\/a> to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles.
The justice department\u2019s heavy tilt to election denialism became palpable soon after Trump took office in 2025 as the department\u2019s voting section in the civil rights division was revamped to align with Trump\u2019s 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 Department of Justice lawyer.
To implement Trump-backed changes in voting rules and curb voting rights, the justice department has recruited a number of new lawyers whose r\u00e9sum\u00e9s include efforts to fight Trump\u2019s 2020 loss to Joe Biden.
The justice department in April, for instance, tapped the 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\u2019s victory, had been hired as a senior counsel by the justice department\u2019s voting section, according to court filings.
Court documents show that Mohrman entered his first appearance on behalf of the government in a lawsuit seeking<\/a> Georgia\u2019s unredacted statewide voter registration records from 2020.
Mohrman is one of a growing list<\/a> of attorneys the section added since 2025 who were involved in 2020 election challenges<\/a> or who worked with well-known election deniers. Among others, the current acting head of the section, former California prosecutor Eric Neff, reportedly has various links to election-conspiracy promoters.
These new hires coincide with shifts in the justice department\u2019s voting section away from its traditional priority of voting rights enforcement towards lawsuits seeking sensitive voter records from states and counties nationwide. In another big break from non-partisan traditions, the Department of Justice last year backed the legality of a Texas redistricting plan that could help Republicans pick up five House seats in the midterms, while it challenged unsuccessfully a California redistricting plan voters approved that could help Democrats win five seats.
On another election front that tracks Trump\u2019s bogus voting-fraud claims, the FBI has made investigating 2020 voting fraud a growing priority. The FBI has active inquiries into voting fraud in 2020 in Georgia and Wisconsin which critics say perpetuate lies about Trump\u2019s loss and may intimidate election workers and voters.
This year, the FBI raided an election hub in Fulton county, Georgia, seized election data and images of ballots in Arizona, demanded ballots in Michigan, and in May expanded its inquiries to include the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area, according to the Washington Post<\/a>.
FBI agents, the Post reported, visited homes of former and current Wisconsin election officials as part of an investigation into discredited election conspiracy theories<\/a> pushed by Trump.
The FBI has tried for months to seize ballots<\/a>, obtain access to poll workers\u2019 personal information, and talk to election officials in swing states, moves that mirror Trump\u2019s debunked claims that he won the 2020 election.
Elsewhere, Trump\u2019s March 2026 executive order on voting by mail has ignited a firestorm of lawsuits and alarms from voting experts.
The gist of the order charges the USPS with deciding who may vote by mail and authorizes it not to deliver ballots sent by individuals who are not included on newly developed federal mail voter lists. The order, ominously, threatens criminal penalties for election workers, mail carriers and others who deliver or send ballots to people the administration claims are ineligible.
In a related step, the order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to develop lists of citizens in every state using unreliable and incomplete federal data materials. The Brennan Center and other voting rights advocates have warned that if implemented, the order would create chaos and curb voting by eligible US citizens.
The Brennan Center and other groups, both non-partisan and partisan, as well as states, have challenged the executive order in court, just as they challenged Trump\u2019s March 2025 executive order changing key voting rules.
To date, several federal courts have blocked<\/a> major parts of Trump\u2019s 2025 order that would require citizens to show a passport or similar document to register to vote, which the administration has appealed.
Notably, some Republican veterans also foresee big risks with Trump\u2019s executive orders on voting.
\u201cThese attempts are clearly unconstitutional. States run elections, not the feds. One executive order even directs the US Postal Service to decide which voters can receive mail-in ballots and which not, as if they could manage such an assignment,\u201d said the veteran Republican consultant Charlie Black.
Noble warned: \u201cTrump\u2019s executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of verified US citizens eligible to vote and the Postal Service to limit mail-in voting, could very well disenfranchise millions of voters while doing nothing to eliminate virtually non-existent voter fraud.\u201d
In Noble\u2019s eyes, \u201cTrump is using lies to justify an unprecedented effort to have the federal government take over the administration of elections, despite the constitution giving the states that power.\u201d<\/p>\n

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With election denialists installed in key positions, officials using series of measures to change voting rulesThe 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\u2019s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-214064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}