Richard L. Hasen writes:

From Alaska to California and who knows where else, DOJ has been filing cases to interfere with how states count and certify votes. The agency’s latest moves—as factually unsupported as they are legally vacuous—demonstrate that for all the fear about DOJ coming in with guns blazing to try to overturn the results of the elections, it is most likely to be shooting blanks.

The main reason that DOJ has been losing election-related lawsuits is that the Constitution does not give the president or the executive branch a role to play in running elections. That matter is left to the states, subject to congressional legislation that can alter the rules in federal elections. So when President Donald Trump issued a March 2025 executive order soon after coming back into office that would have changed the federal voter registration form (mandated by Congress) to require it be accompanied by documentary proof of citizenship like a birth certificate, a federal court shut it down. It ruled that, “Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.” And when the USPS followed Trump’s second executive order by announcing a rule that would have made the agency a federal gatekeeper over state mail ballots, the Supreme Court ruled that USPS was likely to lose on the merits because its muscling into state election processes exceeds its power.

DOJ’s latest moves in California and Alaska are even weaker than DOJ’s earlier attempts to assert power over elections. In California, DOJ demanded that California and Los Angeles County go through a 20,000-person list of what it termed “likely” or “suspected” noncitizens (it vacillated on what to call them), take their mail-in ballots out of the pile, and segregate them so they won’t be counted. It first provided the information on a thumb drive with the password on a Post-it note. After California officials complained that using such a drive would breach security protocols—would you put a Trump-issued thumb drive into your PC?—they provided a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet appears to be wildly inaccurate; more than half from a sample of 200 looked at by the county were people not registered, and many were U.S.-born—a great indicator they are citizens. This is no surprise. [Continue reading…]