Reports: DOJ plan would federalize 2022 midterms

FPI / September 16, 2022

Democrats' attempts to federalize elections was shot down in the Senate earlier this year. Now, critics warn, Team Biden's Department of Justice has decided to circumvent Congress and grab election authority away from the states by fiat.

The Department of Justice is refusing to release 15 pages of documents which detail Team Biden's strategy to implement a “voter access” policy that is being coordinated with leftist organizations just weeks before the 2022 election, reports say.

The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the documents about the DOJ's plan last year. The DOJ refused to produce the documents, but was compelled to do so by a federal court last Thursday, two months before the 2002 midterm elections.

And, still, the DOJ provided just a scant few documents while using a loophole in the FOIA legislation to withhold the “strategic plan” for Executive Order 14019, which was signed by Joe Biden in March 2021.

Tarren Bragdon, head of the FGA, said in a statement: "The American people deserve to know if the Biden administration's unprecedented action is fair and non-partisan, or if it is designed to help one political party over the other. Why are they ignoring public record requests for strategic plans on federal voter registration efforts? Why are they treating these documents like they are classified information dealing with nuclear weapons? Midterms are approaching, and the DOJ's failure to disclose information raises troubling issues. They need to reveal these public documents to keep our elections fair."

Washington Examiner columnist Byron York noted in a Sept. 12 op-ed:

"So the strategic plan, the document that would give the world some information on what the administration is doing to enact Biden’s order, remains a secret. But that’s not all. The Justice Department is withholding lots of other information, as well.

"One troubling clue did make it past Justice Department censors. On July 12, 2021, the Justice Department held a 'listening session' with outside activists working on voting rights. The group included dozens of people, all of them from left-leaning groups. There were 10 from the American Civil Liberties Union, five from the Campaign Legal Center, three from Demos, three from the Southern Poverty Law Center, five from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, two from Black Lives Matter, and many others. The list would not reassure anyone hoping that the Justice Department is working in a scrupulously nonpartisan way. But of course, we don’t really know what the department is doing because the administration is keeping it a secret."

The U.S. Constitution makes it clear that elections are largely to be administered by the states.

York added: "Remember that the main concern of the Foundation for Government Accountability is that the Biden administration is using the power of the federal government for partisan political purposes to influence elections. There are also fears that the administration might be taking on a federal role in elections that the Constitution leaves to the states."

Critics say the “Executive Order on Promoting Access to Voting” reads like a Democrat Party wish-list of “reforms” that enshrines many of the practices that were adopted on a temporary basis during the pandemic-affected 2020 election.

Its provisions include:

• Using federal agencies to promote voter registration;
• Using federal agencies to inform Americans about voting;
• Linking federal agency websites to state voter registration websites;
• Providing voter registration and vote-by-mail applications;
• Using “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations” to register voters at federal agencies;
• Using identification documents issued by the agency to help people register to vote;
• Providing more multilingual services to potential voters;
• Giving public employees “time off to vote in Federal, State, local, Tribal, and territorial elections”;
• Promoting voter registration for federal prisoners.

One provision states: “It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.”

Breitbart senior editor-at-large Joel B. Pollak noted: "While the DOJ hides information about how the federal government is intervening in the upcoming election, guaranteeing that the results will be held in suspicion, Biden, his party, and their allies in the media are claiming that the midterm election is about defending 'democracy' from its opponents, and liken those who doubt election results to traitors and terrorists."

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