Trump’s plan to prosecute election officials and suppress the vote – Mother Jones

Former President Donald Trump has made his intentions very clear if he returns to power: He will seek revenge on anyone he believes stood in his way in the 2024 election. “IF I WIN, the people who CHEATED will be punished to the fullest extent of the law, including lengthy prison sentences,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “Please note that these legal consequences also apply to lawyers, political activists, donors, illegal voters, and corrupt election officials.”

Trump’s threats to prosecute perceived enemies are nothing new. His road to the White House in 2016 was paved with cries of “Lock her up!” But in 2024, Trump now has a plan to take control of the Justice Department and order politically motivated prosecutions – particularly against local election officials.

All this is on the agenda of Project 2025. In a little-noticed section of the 922-page right-wing political book Mandate for Leadership, a close Trump ally laid out how Trump could do exactly what his office threatened to do. This two-page section explains how the Justice Department would take action against local election officials who make decisions with which Trump and his appointees disagree.

Experts say the facts presented in this section are false, outlandish and contrary to current law. But the message it sends is crystal clear: If an election official facilitates voting in a way that the Trump Justice Department doesn’t like, it will investigate and potentially charge that official with criminal misconduct.

As November approaches, lawsuits over voting rules and regulations are already awash. What identification documents are needed to register? Do mail-in ballot envelopes have to be hand-dated? Is a county or state doing enough to keep voter rolls accurate? Such decisions can change the outcome of close elections by disenfranchising or preventing thousands of voters from voting. Trump and the Republican Party oppose laws and policies that make it easier to vote and advocate for additional hurdles that make it harder for people to register and cast their ballots. They do this under the guise of preventing voter fraud, but in reality their policies make it harder for Democratic voters, including people of color, to vote.

While the GOP and its allies have long taken local officials to court over these debates, Project 2025 envisions a dystopian escalation: The Justice Department could launch a raid, an investigation, and even a prosecution if it doesn’t like the electoral policies implemented by a local official.

The proposal is embedded in the chapter on restructuring the Justice Department, written by Gene Hamilton, a former Trump official in the department who is likely in a second administration. Hamilton provides that the Criminal Division of the Justice Department investigate “the adequacy or legality of the state’s election policies.”

“They want to criminalize the conduct of elections and disagreements about the conduct of elections,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former Justice Department official under Obama, after reviewing the section.

To give the federal government the ability to threaten prosecutions for minor issues in the administration of local elections, Project 2025 perversely invokes the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a law passed after the Civil War to protect the rights of former slaves—including their right to vote. Today, the law serves, among other things, to protect voting rights from racial discrimination. Trump himself is facing charges under that law for attempting to invalidate millions of votes and overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.

According to Project 2025, a second Trump administration would weaponize the law, which was originally designed to combat conspiracies to disenfranchise people, to further the administration’s own plans to disenfranchise people. “They’re calling for a world where any disagreement about what is legal is criminally investigated under Klan law,” Levitt says. “That’s crazy, to put it mildly.”

The only example Hamilton cites of an election administration decision that would justify such prosecution is chilling. In 2020, Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s elections director, authorized counties to issue provisional ballots to voters whose mail-in ballots had been invalidated for minor reasons.

“We want voters to be able to cast only one ballot,” Boockvar explains the decision. “If the first ballot they tried to cast cannot be cast because the date was wrong, it will be discarded. Then they can vote with a provisional ballot. This is not a violation of any law. This is just another way to ensure that an eligible American citizen can cast their vote.”

In fact, Boockvar’s actions helped voters cast their ballots. No one was hurt, no one was disenfranchised, and no fraudulent votes were cast. There was certainly no conspiracy to disenfranchise anyone. And yet this is the scenario that Project 2025 calls not just illegal, but criminal. “The fact that they chose this example not only says, ‘We’re going after you for crimes,'” Levitt says, but, “‘We’re going after you for things that aren’t crimes.'”

In fact, just in the last few days, two Pennsylvania courts concluded that voters should have access to provisional ballots in such situations. If upheld, those decisions would likely help Democrats in the crucial swing state, where the party’s voters are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

While the political motivation for a criminal investigation like the one proposed by Hamilton is clear, the legal motivation is pure fiction. “This is intolerable for any prosecutor,” Levitt says. “It’s hard to convey how extreme this particular example they’ve chosen is. And that’s the most frightening thing about the mood. This is the fulfillment of authoritarian wishful thinking put on paper.”

“It’s an incredibly un-American attempt to scare election officials,” Boockvar adds.

The idea of ​​investigating and prosecuting election officials for administrative disputes—and doing so under a law designed to protect citizens’ rights—is almost absurd. Yet with the right personnel and a Trump White House in place, such legal action is certainly possible.

In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, recently authorized raids on the homes of Democrats and civil rights activists in the Latino community. He has also used the power of his office to sue Democratic counties that advocate for easier voting. Last week, he sued Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, for mailing registration forms to residents. A few days later, Paxton sued Travis County, where Austin is located, for hiring a contractor to get people to register to vote. That wasn’t a heinous crime but, as one county commissioner put it, a “nice gesture.” Paxton’s actions follow a law passed last year that allows the Texas secretary of state to take over local election administration in Harris County, where Houston is located and is the largest Democratic stronghold in the state. Trump has put Paxton forward as a candidate for attorney general if he wins in November.

“Look at what’s happening on the ground when it comes to the harassment of civil rights activists in Texas or the superficial purging of voter rolls,” warns Alex Ault, legal counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

For Ault, this is all “part of a trend to make voting more confusing, to make people afraid to actively advocate for and defend their right to vote, and to try to create a chilling effect.”

Project 2025 lays out an authoritarian plan to use the law to intimidate election officials and discourage people from voting. Hamilton is surely aware of this, as he could get a chance to help implement the proposal should Trump return to power – and also the former president, who is calling for the prosecution of anyone who stands in his way.