Ahead of midterms, Trump’s DOJ is targeting voting in three of the most pivotal swing-state counties
With the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week demanding 2024 election records from Wayne County, Michigan, the Trump administration is now aggressively targeting the voting process in perhaps the country’s three most pivotal voting jurisdictions.
Taken as a whole, the triple-strike suggests that the administration’s ongoing effort to undermine fair elections is focused especially on areas — all disproportionately non-white — that are set to play pivotal roles in upcoming contests.
DOJ’s April 14 letter to Wayne County, home of Detroit, comes on the heels of a January FBI raid that seized 2020 ballots and other election records from Fulton County, Georgia. It also comes after DOJ subpoenaed an Arizona lawmaker seeking 2020 election records from Maricopa County.
The three counties are perhaps more crucial than any others in today’s national elections. All three account for a very large share of Democratic votes in highly competitive swing states. This year, Michigan and Georgia are both hosting Senate races that could determine control of the chamber, while Arizona has two U.S. House races currently rated as tossups, as well as competitive races for governor and other statewide posts. And all three states could play key roles in deciding the 2028 presidential contest.
As a result, the benefits for Trump and the GOP of reducing turnout in those three counties — by spreading fear and confusion over voting, or laying the groundwork for voting restrictions — are higher than perhaps anywhere else.
“Once again, President Trump is weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to sabotage our democratic process and turn it into his own personal agency to interfere in state elections. This request is as absurd as it is baseless,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) said in response to the letter to Wayne County.
Still, David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former trial attorney in the DOJ’s voting section, told Democracy Docket the sequence of events underscores the weakness of the administration’s campaign.
“It’s a pattern of retreat,” Becker said. “Three months ago there was a warrant. A month ago, they got a grand jury to issue a subpoena to a friendly witness who wanted to give the information up anyway — and it was largely public information. Now they’re issuing a strongly worded letter.”
In January, the Trump administration obtained a search warrant for the FBI to raid a Fulton County, Georgia, election hub and seize more than 650 boxes of ballots and other materials related to the 2020 election. Unsealed court records revealed that the administration used debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election made by notorious conspiracy theorists and election deniers as the basis of the evidence to convince a federal judge to grant the search warrant.
And in Maricopa County, the FBI subpoenaed Arizona’s Senate president for voting equipment and data related to an audit of the county’s 2020 presidential election. The Maricopa County subpoena was based on a widely debunked audit of the 2020 election conducted by a sketchy cybersecurity firm and funded by a notorious cast of election deniers and conspiracy theorists.
The letter to Wayne County, sent by DOJ civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon, demanded election records from 2024, while citing several unsubstantiated allegations of misconduct by election officials in the 2020 election.
Dhillon cited three cases of voter fraud in the 2020 election to justify her demand for 2024 ballots. But each of those cases were instances where fraud had been detected and caught by local and state officials.
“Successful convictions underline that Michigan’s safeguards work and that instances of voter fraud are rare and addressed,” Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) said. “Using these prosecutions and recycling debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories as justification to demand copies of the ballots of Michigan residents is a clear attempt to bully clerks and spread fear, even after Donald Trump won Michigan in 2024.”
In November, nearly two dozen Michigan GOP lawmakers wrote to DOJ asking for federal oversight of the upcoming midterm elections, citing debunked election conspiracies and bogus claims of voter fraud as justification for a federal takeover.
“This is clearly the DOJ weaponizing its law enforcement authority — not to actually enforce the law, or investigate actual crimes, because there were no crimes that were committed,” Becker said, in response to the Wayne County letter. “They’re basically acknowledging they got nothing. It’s going to be used for propaganda and PR. And DOJ’s law enforcement powers aren’t supposed to be used for propaganda and PR.”
“There’s not even trying to provide justification,” Becker added. “They’re not even trying to make a reasonable request for actual documents. They’re not trying to address what the courts have said in the past voter data cases, that you can’t just engage in just an expedition for whatever.”
