DOJ monitoring plans and DHS voter checks raise concerns of election interference

By — Liz Landers Liz Landers By — Doug Adams Doug Adams Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/doj-monitoring-plans-and-dhs-voter-checks-raise-concerns-of-election-interference Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio With the midterm elections less than two weeks away, a new legal battle is raising questions about the federal government's role in policing who is eligible to vote. A federal judge in California has blocked a Department of Homeland Security effort to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. White House correspondent Liz Landers reports. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. Geoff Bennett: With a proper welcome to the "News Hour" now, we should say we had a technical issue at the start of tonight's broadcast. So thank you for bearing with us.Now, with the midterm elections less than two weeks away, a new legal battle is raising questions about the federal government's role in policing who is eligible to vote. A federal judge in California has blocked a Department of Homeland Security effort to identify noncitizens on voter rolls.I spoke earlier about it with our White House correspondent, Liz Landers.So, Liz, this federal judge issued this ruling with now less than two weeks before Election Day. So there's some clear urgency here. Liz Landers: Yes, the Department of Homeland Security has been engaged in this operation since August, according to this lawsuit. And this federal judge in California ruled yesterday that they must restrict their field operations to look for voter fraud and noncitizens on voter rolls.DHS cannot do stops in field interviews unless they think someone is a noncitizen. This applies to nine different states, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin. There are hundreds of DHS agents who are assigned across all states to look for voter fraud.This has been dubbed the Unlawful Voter Initiative. And the judge here is concerned that the lists created by DHS had errors and did have citizens' names on them. It is already illegal to vote if you are a noncitizen and participate in a federal election here.It's also extremely rare for this to happen. The judge is allowing this to go into effect tomorrow, so that the government has time to appeal. Geoff Bennett: And there's a separate lawsuit the DOJ has brought in California related to mail ballots? Bring us up to speed. Liz Landers: Yes, the Department of Justice is suing the California secretary of state and also the top election official in Los Angeles County to halt them and prevent them from counting 20,000 mail ballots there.DOJ has alleged that there are 20,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls there. The L.A. County registrar's office told me today that they have not stopped the ballot processing there. This is still playing out in a court of law. This is a hearing. The next hearing on this is going to be next Tuesday.And the attorney general, Todd Blanche, was asked about the department's intentions behind the lawsuit earlier today. Todd Blanche, U.S. Attorney General: We're not trying to create chaos. It continues to baffle me why anybody, if presented with evidence that there are tens of thousands, 20,000 ineligible voters that are receiving ballots, that there isn't some motivation, anything to do something about that. Liz Landers: In response to these actions from the Trump administration and others, there's now been a group of Democratic organizations that have sued the Trump administration, alleging voter intimidation.And this lawsuit says that there are -- that the Trump administration is using unfounded voter fraud claims to influence how the elections are conducted.Geoff, I want to be clear here that there are very few, but there are examples of noncitizens voting in elections. New Jersey uncovered a few months ago a software glitch -- this happened years ago -- that allowed noncitizens to register and vote in that state. It was a mistake. There were 6,600 people that registered to vote; 340 of those actually vote. Geoff Bennett: When the DOJ alleges that some 20,000 noncitizens are on the voter rolls in California, where is that number coming from? Liz Landers: So the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security are compiling lists based on state data that they're getting, but it's not complete data sets.And that's why you are seeing states like California, like the secretary of state and the Los Angeles County registrar, saying, we don't know if this is an accurate list.And, in fact, some of those lists that they have been giving back to states saying, hey, we think that all these people are noncitizens, as it turns out, especially in Nevada -- this was a recent example -- there were many people on that list, in fact, all of them in Nevada, who were U.S. citizens. Geoff Bennett: Now, beyond all this, you have also reported today that the Justice Department is preparing a large-scale election monitoring effort? What did they announce? Liz Landers: Yes, a senior Department of Justice official briefed reporters on this and said that they're going to send more than 1,000 election monitors across all 50 states in the country.The agency regularly monitors elections, but this year is a big spike in that number. A DHS -- a DOJ official, I should say, told us that the 2022 midterms had 388 people serving as monitors. So this year would be more than double that.These efforts are guided by federal statutes like the Voting Rights Act. And the DOJ official was very clear that their monitors must follow state and local guidance. This is supposed to be a passive act. These election monitors are supposed to observe and take notes.And monitoring these elections is supposed to be a way to ensure that voting rights laws are being followed, Geoff. Geoff Bennett: And how are state and local officials responding to all of this? Liz Landers: Secretaries of state have started to receive these letters from the Department of Justice about this election monitor program.The Kansas Republican secretary of state, Scott Schwab, he said he got notified earlier this week by DOJ. He's going to allow the election monitors to come to Kansas. When I asked him about this larger program, he kind of chuckled and he said that 1,000 monitors is not very many because of how many voting jurisdictions there are across the country.On the other hand, Colorado's Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold says that she is concerned about these election monitors. She doesn't see a basis for why the Department of Justice needs to send them. She said that the Department of Justice is hostile to free and fair elections and pointed to their efforts to obtain state voter rolls and also DOJ's defense of the president's executive orders on voting. Geoff Bennett: Liz Landers, our thanks to you for all of this reporting. We appreciate it. Liz Landers: Of course. Listen to this Segment By — Liz Landers Liz Landers Liz Landers is a correspondent for PBS News Hour, where she covers the White House and the Trump administration. Prior to joining the News Hour, she served as the national security correspondent for Scripps News, and also reported on disinformation for the network. By — Doug Adams Doug Adams