President Donald Trump’s Justice Division is suing 14 states, including Washington, in an attempt to get detailed personal information about every voter in those states.
In whole, 40 states have been requested to supply voter knowledge, however solely two super-red states, Wyoming and Indiana, have complied. Maybe considerably, the 14 being sued are all deep blue or, at the very least, blue-leaning, states.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, like so a lot of his friends across the nation, has refused the DOJ’s demand. Hobbs cites state regulation that shields private info from public disclosure – objects resembling driver’s license numbers and full dates of delivery. He’s providing up info that’s public, together with delivery years, addresses, names and voting historical past, however that isn’t sufficient for Legal professional Normal Pam Bondi.
“Correct voter rolls are the cornerstone of truthful and free elections, and too many states have fallen right into a sample of noncompliance with primary voter roll upkeep,” Bondi claims.
That sounds fairly affordable – if it have been true. In truth, although, it’s a canard that fails to cover the true impetus behind this seize for voter data. The one place the place there are troubling issues with how elections are carried out in the USA is within the fevered creativeness of the president of the USA.
Trump has been ranting about rigged elections, useless individuals on voter rolls, noncitizens voting and the corruption of mail-in ballots ever since he misplaced his re-election bid in 2020. There is no such thing as a proof of any of his wild accusations, significantly in a state like Washington that has had no trace of election scandal in trendy occasions.
It’s no shock that, in submitting the lawsuit in opposition to Hobbs and the state, DOJ attorneys didn’t observe correct court docket procedures and have been ordered by a federal decide to wash up their act. Comparable snafus are extra the rule than the exception now that the once-respected Justice Division has turn into Trump’s private regulation agency.
But, irrespective of what number of occasions DOJ attorneys are embarrassed in court docket struggling to show Trump’s tirades into one thing near a authorized argument, the president will hold demanding that the litigious clown present rolls on and on.
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