DOJ Drops ‘Illegal Voters’ Lawsuit Against California After Getting Smoked In The Mid-Terms
I now look like an alarmist. I assumed everything done by the Trump administration prior to the midterm elections was designed to swing the election towards MAGA. For that, I don't apologize. It definitely was. However, I routinely assured readers that the weird shit being done by the administration was just laying the groundwork for post-election fuckery. That fuckery has largely failed to materialize. Mea culpa, etc.
The Democratic Party flipped both the House and Senate and scored other wins in deeply red states, seemingly evidence of voters just being sick and tired of Trump's bullshit. Trump's bullshit, however, was generally tied to efforts designed to dismantle everything that makes democracy special, as well as the systems of checks and balances meant to ensure that even the dumbest of aspiring autocrats couldn't turn the USA into the USSR between election cycles.
The Trump administration is waving the white flag. Not only did Trump's handpicked election integrity" enforcer resign immediately after the November Massacre, but the administration no longer seems to have the stomach for setting resources on fire in hopes of subverting the democratic process. We should still reserve a great deal of skepticism and caution, given that there's still a presidential election on the horizon, but we should take heart in the fact that the administration is no longer willing to defend its most extreme (and most unsupported) allegations about illegal voters." (h/t Chris Geidner)
The election results had barely settled before the DOJ went to court to pull out of its unwarranted attack on California's election processes. The DOJ's filing [PDF] voluntarily dismisses its insane demand that California sequester at least 20,000 ballots based on nothing but unverified, wild ass claims about the supposed illegality" of the voters who may or may not have voted in this election or ones prior to this.
The DOJ tries to pretend its tail isn't tucked by doing a bit of sour grapes-ing:
The United States provides this notice of voluntary dismissal pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i).
The United States sought targeted and modest relief to have California segregate vote-by-mail ballots cast by people highly likely to be noncitizens until state election officials-with the opportunity to work with federal officials-could confirm those voters' citizenship. The United States sought this relief to protect American voters in this State because each legal vote that is offset by an illegally cast vote constitutes irreparable harm.
[...]
This Court did not timely grant the United States' requested relief.
And so it goes. The DOJ bitches that irreparable harm is not only possible, but already has been done because multiple levels of the court system wouldn't honor its demands - demands, it must be noted, that were delivered to California election officials in the form of a USB drive with a Post-It note that had the password hand printed on it. I wish I were making this up because it would mean I'm in the process of negotiating film rights for my historical fiction novel.
But, no. This is a thing that actually happened. The DOJ, DHS, and the Trump administration in general continued to claim hundreds of thousands of people were voting illegally. But when asked for actual evidence, the numbers came down. Way down. The DHS swept California, engaging in high-profile raids to round up illegal" voters. In the end, the DHS/DOJ managed to put together 28 arrests in California, a state that has 23 million registered voters.
Even in abject failure (and now without the performative head of Trump's election integrity" force, Harmeet Dhillion, engaging in day-to-day dipshittery), the administration is still trying to spin this as a failure of the court system, rather than a failure of the administration to generate anything resembling proof of its baseless accusations.
In light of the Supreme Court's denial, the United States is evaluating how to best ensure that American votes are protected, including by preventing vote dilution by noncitizens. In addition, by the time of this Court's hearing on November 13 in this matter, California will have already commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones. There is then no way to get the challenged ballots segregated.
Hey, I'm no Supreme Court law-talking guy, but I think just shutting the fuck up about imaginary threats to American votes" might be the best course of action. As for the rest of this paragraph, it's probably better to make a formal complaint sound like it was written by lawyers, rather than petty people feeling bitchy because no court was willing to entertain their stupidity.