Senate Democrats expressed outrage and alarm that the Justice Department sought to amend a policy about public investigations into election fraud, even as they have pushed to relax longstanding election-integrity laws in many battleground states.
“The Department has long recognized that public investigations of alleged election fraud can ‘interject[] the investigation itself as an issue’ in an ongoing election, creating ‘the obvious risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities,’” wrote 13 Democrat senators on the Judiciary and Rules committees in a letter to Corey R. Amundson, chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section criminal division.
The exception applies only if “the integrity of any component of the federal government is implicated by election offenses,” the Democrats noted.
But their concern comes as President Donald Trump has repeatedly sought to call attention to issues of ballot mishandling and abuse that are likely to result from increased mail-in voting.
“It is deeply troubling that the Department has chosen to weaken its non-interference policy weeks before Election Day and while millions of Americans have already voted, many of them by mail,” claimed the senators.
Left-wing operatives immediately began calling for an increase in remote and absentee ballots on the very day that Trump declared a national emergency in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
They have emphatically denied the existence of any evidence that might erode public confidence by casting aspersions on mail-in voting.
However, evidence has repeatedly shown that the system is ripe for abuse. Among the many concerns are:
- the automatic mailing of ballots to ineligible and inactive voters
- the abundance of duplicate ballots and carelessly discarded ballots
- the Postal Service’s failure to deliver completed ballots, along with the endorsement of Democrat candidate Joe Biden by top postal-worker unions
- third-party ballot-harvesting initiatives that make use of partisan (often left-wing) activists in soliciting and collecting ballots
- the questionable tallying of ballots by potentially corrupt election officials and the loosening of deadlines for receiving them
Federal authorities already are known to have investigated a major ballot-stuffing ring in Pennsylvania, which may be one of the most crucial states in deciding the Nov. 3 election.
Meanwhile, Democrats’ attempts to make 11th-hour changes to voting laws have only sowed confusion and led to a deluge of last-minute lawsuits.
But the Left has continued to deflect from its suspicious operations by insisting that it is the authorities investigating such concerns who are, in fact, interfering with the election.
They have even trotted out a popular old standby, claiming—without clear evidence—that the Russians were behind efforts to discredit mail-in voting.
“This policy change coincides with repeated false claims by the President and Attorney General [William] Barr that voting by mail will lead to rampant fraud, while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is warning that Russia is amplifying these claims to undermine trust in the electoral process,” claimed Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, in a press release.
Klobuchar’s home state was the subject of recent scrutiny after an exposé by conservative watchdog Project Veritas offered evidence of widespread, systemic ballot-harvesting abuses among Minneapolis’s Somali community.
Those abuses were overseen in large part by Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District encompassing its largest city.
Outrage over the almost exclusively blue-led state’s mishandling of race riots following the death of George Floyd has recently put the Gopher State in play for Trump, despite Hillary Clinton having edged him out in 2016.
It is one of several closely watched states in the upcoming election—many of them states where Trump narrowly prevailed four years ago—in which razor-thin margins could tilt the election either way.
Democrats long claimed that former FBI Director James Comey‘s interference in the 2016 election, along with alleged Russian disinformation efforts, helped lead Trump to victory.
However, both claims have since been debunked. In fact, both Comey and Russia were later revealed to be colluding with the Clinton campaign in order to undermine Trump by concocting false allegations that he was working with the Kremlin.
Comey’s decision to reopen a case into Clinton’s email scandal a few weeks before the election—due to his concern that it would eventually come to light and damage the FBI’s credibility—came only after the FBI had sat on the evidence for at least a month.
Yet, Klobuchar and other Democrats fretted that the DOJ’s potential probes into the delivery and counting of mail-in ballots could once again “jeopardize ‘the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and non-partisanship.'”
