Ashley Oliver reports for the Washington Examiner on the Biden administration’s legal battles over the 2024 election.
The Department of Justice’s recent plea to the Supreme Court to allow voters in Arizona to apply for absentee ballots without documented proof of citizenship is one of several instances of the Biden administration wading into state-level election battles ahead of the 2024 election.
The DOJ has also pushed this year for more lenient mail-in voting rules in Ohio and Alabama, and it brought a lawsuit to add more Spanish-speaking poll workers in Rhode Island.
The department’s involvement in state election matters is not new — the government has since the 1960s had jurisdiction to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The civil rights-era legislation was designed to make sure black citizens had an equal ability to vote. The DOJ also has for decades had other federal laws at its disposal, such as the National Voter Registration Act.
However, during the Biden administration, the DOJ has become more vocal about elections and made a concerted effort to expand access to voting, an entirely opposite approach from the Trump administration. The activity aligns with Democrats’ broader claims that Republicans want to make voting harder, which Democrats claim can disenfranchise voters or discriminate against racial minorities.
Chad Ennis, a longtime attorney and vice president of the Honest Elections Project, observed that Democrats’ push for more voting access threatens election integrity.
“They’ll couch it in under the guise of expanding voting rights, but it’s really, almost without fail, an attack on common sense rules to help make sure the elections run smoothly and fairly and accurately,” Ennis told the Washington Examiner.
Republicans, for their part, have since 2020 had a heightened concern about voter fraud. In the last presidential election, when former President Donald Trump narrowly lost his race, the defeat came after many states loosened their voting laws on an emergency basis in the name of COVID-19.
