Too Big To Ignore: Will of the People Weekly

With Election Day four weeks out, Trump and Republicans are racing ahead to try and impose last-minute drastic changes to elections in key states. Courts have handed Trump a string of defeats, and even after months of calling mail ballots “inherently corrupt,” on Saturday Trump posted a video telling Republicans to vote by mail. Trump recently told reporters he won’t rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around Election Day. State Republicans haven’t backed down either; in Georgia, a GOP top elections official went rogue and asked Trump’s DOJ to intervene in the state’s election systems and investigate the Secretary of State. With voter registration closing today in a dozen states (including Georgia) and early voting opening this week in several others, what happens next is up to us, not them. When all of us show up, the will of the people wins. Try and stop us.

In the Administration

• Trump won’t rule out invoking the Insurrection Act or declaring an emergency around Election Day. Asked Thursday whether he would use the Insurrection Act, Trump said “I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see,” adding, “I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.” He told Time he “hadn’t ruled anything out” on declaring an emergency near Election Day, and when asked about sending ICE to the polls: “Haven’t thought of it.”
• After months of attacking mail voting, Trump is now telling Republicans to vote by mail. In a video posted Saturday, Trump told supporters to “vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day,” three weeks after the Supreme Court blocked his order restricting mail ballots. As recently as July he called mail ballots “inherently corrupt,” and in March, days before mailing in his own ballot, he said “mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.” CNN rolled the tape.
• Trump’s year-long hunt for proof the 2020 election was stolen came up empty, and the man who ran it quit. A Reuters investigation found that White House lawyer Kurt Olsen directed a search spanning the FBI, DOJ, DHS and the intelligence community, subpoenaed 2.1 million Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix) ballot images, and concluded there was no evidence of hacking or manipulated votes. His referral led the FBI to raid Fulton County, GA (Atlanta)’s election office in January. Olsen resigned last week, the same day as the FBI co-deputy director who oversaw that raid.
• Trump’s attorney general admits his noncitizen-voting crackdown has found no pattern after 90 voter-fraud cases. An Associated Press review found DOJ’s 90 cases, 50 of them against alleged noncitizens, wouldn’t come close to swinging any federal or state election; the 10 people charged in Minnesota allegedly voted across three elections in which more than 8 million ballots were cast. “I don’t think we can say there’s a pattern we’ve identified,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
• Trump’s Postal Service cut five days off the special measures that get mail ballots delivered on time. USPS told employees last week that its “extraordinary measures,” including separate post office lines for ballots needing postmarks, extended hours and drive-throughs, now begin Oct. 24, 10 days before Election Day rather than the 15 days used in 2022 and 2024, giving no reason for the change.

In Congress

• Senate Republicans failed for a sixth time to pass Trump’s voter ID bill, 53-47. Republicans attached the mail-voting restrictions to a popular stock-trading ban and forced a vote last week that fell short of 60, with every Democrat and independent voting no. The Senate has no hearings scheduled this week, and the House stays out until Nov. 9.
• Top Democrats on the intelligence committees put Trump’s spy chief on notice about election interference claims. Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes wrote Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton on Friday listing the threat briefings they expect before Election Day and saying they will “assume” no foreign manipulation took place unless he tells their committees otherwise, a move meant to head off any claim that China or Iran compromised the vote.

In the Courts

• United States v. Cox (U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida)
  • Trump’s prosecutors charged a Jamaican national who has lived in the U.S. for decades with voting in 2020. On Thursday, Judge David Leibowitz threw out the case and ruled the 40-year-old federal law against noncitizen voting unconstitutional, writing that “Congress has no power to say who can vote or who cannot vote in federal elections,” a power the Constitution reserves to the states. The ruling applies only to her case, but it is the first of its kind and gives every defendant in DOJ’s prosecution campaign a new argument.
• Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County et al. v. Department of Homeland Security et al. (U.S. District Court, D.C.)
  • Nashville, Columbus and four Texas counties sued over FEMA’s rule tying counterterrorism grants to demands like verifying every voter’s citizenship and switching to hand-marked ballots. Last Monday, Judge Amir Ali struck the conditions down, finding they “go beyond what Congress authorized,” and vacated the 20% of funding FEMA had withheld to enforce them. Twenty-five states and D.C. have a parallel suit pending.
• United States v. Raffensperger (U.S. District Court, Northern District of Georgia)
  • Trump’s DOJ sued Georgia’s Republican secretary of state for the full voter file, including birthdates, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, after he refused to break state privacy law. On Wednesday, Judge Victoria Calvert dismissed the case, the department’s 26th straight loss, writing that the Civil Rights Act “does not preempt Georgia’s voter privacy law.” Four suits remain, in Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho and Utah, and DOJ says it will likely appeal.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center v. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services et al. (U.S. District Court, Maryland)
  • After a DOJ lawyer refused to say whether Trump’s federal citizen lists would launch before the midterms, Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to give 30 days’ notice before releasing any list, meaning the earliest it could do so is Oct. 28, six days before Election Day. The lawyer bristled even at that: “If you want to enjoin us, enjoin us.” DOJ has defied similar notice orders in related cases.

In the States

Georgia

• The Republican-controlled election board’s executive director sent Trump’s DOJ and DHS demands the board never approved, including a federal investigation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in letters the board’s own Republican chair called “a political hit piece against our secretary of state.” He also asked DOJ to investigate ERIC, the nonpartisan voter-roll program Georgia pays to belong to.

Texas

• Four Black and Hispanic voters sued Tarrant County (Fort Worth) on Friday to restore the 92 Election Day polling sites Republican commissioners cut, arguing the plan “intentionally treats Black and Hispanic voters unequally.” Early voting there begins Oct. 19.

North Carolina

• Roughly 98,000 voters got letters demanding they upload ID numbers by Friday’s registration deadline or risk a provisional ballot, after the state settled a Trump DOJ lawsuit by pushing the burden of fixing incomplete records onto voters. About half have responded.

Montana

• A state court blocked a Republican law that got nearly 3,000 absentee ballots thrown out last year over a missing or wrong birthdate on the envelope, finding the state offered no evidence of fraud to justify it.

Arizona

• Maricopa County’s Republican prosecutor confirmed that of 60 voters the SAVE database flagged as noncitizens, 52 are citizens, and nearly all of the eight who weren’t citizens were registered by mistake while renewing a driver’s license.

Upcoming Elections & Deadlines

Monday, October 5

• Voter registration deadline in 12 states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas
• U.S. Supreme Court’s new term opens

Tuesday, October 6

• Early voting opens in Ohio, Indiana, New Mexico and Wyoming

Wednesday, October 7

• Early voting opens in Arizona
• Missouri voter registration deadline

Friday, October 9

• North Carolina and Oklahoma voter registration deadlines

Saturday, October 10

• Delaware voter registration deadline