Too Big To Ignore: Will of the People Weekly

Just over a week from Election Day, Trump’s Justice Department is already trying to throw out tens of thousands of ballots in one state and suing to block certification if his preferred candidate loses in another. In Alaska, Trump’s DOJ is asking a court to stop the state from certifying its Senate race if Trump’s candidate loses, a ludicrous suit Trump says he personally ordered. Meanwhile, he also wants the California ballots of 20,000 so-called likely noncitizens set aside. A federal appeals panel is set to rule at any moment on the California ballots, but the courts keep refusing him: the DOJ’s voter-roll crusade stands at 0 for 27 as of last Friday and his DHS’ door-knocking (of people its own agents should know are citizens) is barred through the close of polls next week. With early voting ending this week in most of the country, and millions of votes already tallied, 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’s attorney general says he works for Trump, not for an independent Justice Department. Days before his department sued to stop Alaska’s certification, Todd Blanche said on a podcast “I work for President Trump,” called the idea of separation between the department and the White House a “misperception,” and, noting he had been accused of not suffering from independence, answered: “I don’t.”
• Trump’s DOJ is deploying the largest election monitoring force in history, and it is landing on states that defied him. Utah learned last Thursday it will get some of the roughly 1,000 monitors after its Republican election chief refused to hand over unredacted voter rolls, and counties in Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Texas and Washington have been notified too. Utah’s ground rules: monitors won’t approach voters and won’t be armed.
• Trump’s noncitizen-voting crackdown has charged 28 legal permanent residents in California, and only six of them with voting. Most face felony charges of lying on naturalization paperwork that carry up to 10 years, against one year for the voting misdemeanor. One man was registered through a driver’s license prompt in 2007, says he never voted, and was arrested outside his home; another returned a 2024 ballot her husband says she believed was a registration form.
• Trump’s U.S. attorney in Texas told voters he will hunt them down. In a video posted on the first day of Texas early voting, the prosecutor said: “If you violate federal election law, I will hunt you down and prosecute you. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. We’ll see you out at the polls.” He also threatened “crooked local election administrators.”

In the Courts

• United States v. Alaska (U.S. District Court, Alaska)
  • Trump’s DOJ sued late last Thursday to block Alaska from certifying its U.S. Senate race if votes cast for a second candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan would change the incumbent’s outcome, demanding certification wait “pending an investigation” into voter confusion. Trump told reporters he was the “one that said, ‘Do it.’” The Democratic campaign and the DSCC moved to dismiss the suit as “wholly baseless” Sunday night, proposing briefing by midweek, and Alaska’s certification is due Nov. 25.
• United States v. California (U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit)
  • At Sunday’s emergency argument over DOJ’s bid to block the counting of 20,000 Californians’ mail ballots, the department’s lawyer could not say where its list of so-called likely noncitizens came from, allowing only that the government “was supplied a list that was purchased originally from California.” Roughly 550,000 mail ballots are already processed by the department’s own count. The panel could rule at any moment, and the trial court hears the case Tuesday, a hearing the department asked to have canceled.
• California Nurses Association v. Mullin (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California)
  • A federal court barred DHS from door-knocking and field interviews of people its agents know or should suspect are U.S. citizens across nine states, finding the target lists swept in naturalized citizens, and with no appeal reported by Friday’s deadline the order reportedly runs through the close of polls on Election Day. A related challenge to the list-matching behind the California roundup gets a hearing Friday.
• Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice (U.S. District Court, D.C.)
  • Trump’s DOJ is still waiting on its bid to revive the nationwide voter purge program struck down Oct. 9, with its request to keep the program running during the appeal undecided and the program on ice in the meantime. Its parallel demands for state voter rolls fell to 0 for 27 on Friday, when a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the Utah case with prejudice and wrote that courts have “no warrant to elevate vague invocations of statutory purpose over the words Congress chose.”

In the States

North Carolina

• Mail-ballot rejections are running at 4.22 percent across 27 tracked counties, nearly double the rate for all of 2022, with more than half of Wake County’s rejections caused by the new unsealed-envelope rule a federal judge declined to block, and voters whose ballots are spoiled can still vote in person through Saturday.

Georgia

• Georgians passed 1 million ballots by last Tuesday, ahead of 2022’s pace and nearly all of it in person, with early voting running through Friday.

Arizona

• The Maricopa County recorder restored all 25 citizens he had wrongly flagged as so-called noncitizens, after the state attorney general sued and a court ordered same-week mediation.

South Carolina

• Clarendon County’s GOP-controlled election board closed six polling sites, folding eight precincts into four locations in a move the ACLU says affects more than 61 percent of the county’s Black voting population and that only the legislature had power to make.

New Hampshire

• The U.S. Supreme Court let the state’s student-ID ban stand for Election Day in an unsigned order, over Justice Jackson’s lone dissent.

Upcoming Elections & Deadlines

Monday, October 26

• Early voting begins in Washington, D.C.
• Advance voter registration deadlines in Colorado and Washington (in-person registration continues through Election Day)

Tuesday, October 27

• Mail-ballot request deadlines in Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania
• Early voting ends in Louisiana
• Last safe day to mail a ballot in states that require receipt by Election Day; after today, mail-ballot voters must use a drop box or return it in person to ensure it is properly counted

Wednesday, October 28

• Early voting begins in Oklahoma

Thursday, October 29

• Early voting begins in Kentucky
• Early voting ends in Maryland and Tennessee
• Mail-ballot request deadline in Wisconsin

Friday, October 30

• Early voting ends in Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Nevada, Texas, and Utah
• Mail-ballot request deadline in Michigan

Saturday, October 31

• Early voting ends in North Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kentucky, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia
• Early voting ends in parts of Florida

Sunday, November 1

• Early voting ends in Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.