Report: Trump White House helping build national voter list

The Trump administration is quietly building a national voter database to help implement the president’s latest anti-voting order ahead of the midterm elections, despite its recent claims in court filings that it wouldn’t. 

According to reporting from NOTUS, White House officials have been meeting with leaders from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the U.S. States Postal Service (USPS) to move forward with plans to build and implement federally approved voter lists, along with plans to restrict mail-in voting.

The discussions stem from President Donald Trump’s most recent anti-voting executive order targeting mail-in voting. The order directed DHS to work with the Social Security Administration to create lists of verified U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state. It also instructed USPS to only send absentee ballots to voters on approved lists. 

The order was met with a barrage of lawsuits challenging the Constitutionality of the president’s decree; the U.S. Constitution grants the states, not the federal government, the power to oversee elections. One of the main lawsuits against the order came from Democratic Party officials and a coalition of pro-voting groups. A federal judge is hearing the plaintiff’s case to block Trump’s order Thursday in Washington, D.C. 

DOJ attorneys argued in a legal brief earlier this month that a federal judge can’t block Trump’s anti-voting order because, they said, the actions directed under the order “do not yet exist.”

But Thursday’s report contradicts these claims as Trump administration officials from each department have reportedly been meeting to discuss how they plan to implement and defend the order in court. The officials involved in meetings include DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, USPS CEO David Steiner, and Heather Honey, a notorious election conspiracy theorist who was appointed last year to a senior “election integrity” position within DHS. 

The Democratic officials and pro-voting groups filed a brief before Thursday’s hearing pointing out that the Trump administration seemed to have contradicted their own argument. 

“An article published today, May 14, after Democratic Party Plaintiffs had filed their reply brief in support of their motion—confirms that numerous White House officials have orchestrated discussions among Department of Justice officials and the Chief Executive Officer of USPS concerning the implementation of the Executive Order challenged in this case,” the brief said, pointing out that the article “provides further confirmation that this case is ripe for adjudication and contradicts Defendants’ suggestion that they have taken no concrete steps toward implementation of the Order.”