The DOJ refused to comment when asked if it was investigating Pennsylvania counties that disenfranchised voters by counting illegal ballots.
Attorney General Merrick Garland talks a lot about voting rights. In August, he promised the Justice Department would “use every authority we have to protect the right to vote.” In 2021, he said the department would “rededicate” itself to “enforcing federal law to protect the franchise for all eligible voters.”
This past week, a handful of Pennsylvania counties disenfranchised voters by choosing to count illegal ballots that canceled out legal votes. It’s a massive scandal.
As Democrat Sen. Bob Casey is refusing to concede a losing race to his Republican challenger Dave McCormick, officials in Bucks, Philadelphia, Monroe, Erie, Chester, and Montgomery Counties have flouted the law in an apparent attempt to deliver Casey some extra votes. But the DOJ is nowhere to be seen.
But why did the DOJ — which has shown itself only too willing to get involved in election fights when doing so benefits Democrats — sit this one out? We all know why.
The DOJ was quick to sue the state of Virginia last month for removing noncitizens — for whom it is illegal to vote in federal and Virginia elections — from its voter rolls. In compliance with a law signed 18 years ago by a Democrat governor, Gov. Glenn Youngkin oversaw the removal of more than 6,000 noncitizens from Virginia’s voter rolls from his inauguration in 2022 to July 2024. Garland’s DOJ sued to stop Virginia from continuing, arguing the voter roll maintenance ran afoul of the National Voter Registration Act’s prohibition on certain removals within 90 days of an election.
But, as former Federal Elections Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky has noted, that NVRA provision deals specifically with people whose addresses have changed. The statute says the 90-day provision doesn’t apply to removing people who have become ineligible by dying or being convicted of a felony — so it obviously doesn’t apply to noncitizens, “who were never eligible to register in the first place,” Spakovsky says.
On Oct. 30, in a smackdown of the DOJ’s lawfare, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary order allowing Virginia to keep the noncitizens it had removed off the voter rolls for the 2024 election.
The DOJ brought a similar lawsuit against Alabama in September. It also went to war with Arizona over the state’s laws requiring voters to prove their U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. It went after a small Texas county for not making race a big enough factor in its redistricting for county commissioner precincts.
It went after Donald Trump ally Elon Musk for a giveaway his PAC organized for swing state voters who sign a pledge supporting constitutional liberties. In March, Garland committed to targeting popular state laws that require voter ID, comparing them to Jim Crow laws. And of course, his department has found time to wage not one but two politicized prosecutions of Trump himself, which were clearly designed to hurt the Republican’s electoral chances.
But somehow, the DOJ just doesn’t have the time to check out the lawbreaking going on in Pennsylvania. Maybe they’re too busy packing their bags and hiring lawyers.