Experts alarmed as Trump launches broad-front attack on US voting rights

Lead

The Trump administration is waging a broad-front effort to tighten voting rules, using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations, and an executive order to limit voting by mail, according to election experts and former officials. The moves mirror President Donald Trump's false claims that he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, as reported by The Guardian.

Since Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the Justice Department, the FBI, and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, according to The Guardian. These moves, experts say, can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

Coverage comparison

Two reports from The Guardian — World detail distinct aspects of the administration's actions. One focuses on the nationwide strategy, including lawsuits and an executive order; the other covers a specific FBI raid on a voting rights group in Ohio. Both frame the administration's actions as a crackdown, with language such as "war on voting rights" and "unprecedented attack on democracy," and attribute the motivation to Trump's false claims of voter fraud.

The first report emphasizes the legal and investigative tools being deployed, while the second highlights the human impact and the response from elected officials and civil rights organizations. Neither report presents a perspective from the administration or its supporters, focusing instead on criticism from experts, ex-officials, and advocacy groups.

Key claims

• The justice department has filed lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from 30 states, even though, by law, states control elections, as reported by The Guardian.
• The FBI has launched investigations into debunked allegations of voting fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin, and a few other swing states that Trump lost in 2020, according to The Guardian.
• Trump in late March issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which he has long claimed without evidence contribute to fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder, The Guardian reported.
• States and nonpartisan voting rights groups have filed lawsuits to block the executive order. In early April, officials from 23 Democratic states including California and Washington DC filed a lawsuit arguing the order was an unconstitutional effort to interfere with states' administering their elections, according to The Guardian.
• The FBI raided the office of a voting rights group in Ohio in what The Guardian described as a crackdown on such organizations ahead of the midterm elections. FBI agents seized computers and phones from the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a grassroots group that does voter registration work, according to Prentiss Haney, a board member of the group, as quoted by The Guardian.
• Haney called the raid "a full on coordinated assault weaponizing the justice department and DHS against people who are fighting for working class voters and Black voters to make sure they have access to the ballot," in an interview with The Guardian.
• The agents appeared to be examining accusations of fraud relating to the 2024 election, Haney said, though the specifics of the investigation were not immediately clear. The FBI's office in Cleveland did not return a request for comment, The Guardian reported.
• Trump won the popular vote in Ohio in 2024, delivering him 17 electoral votes, and Republican Bernie Moreno unseated Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in a race that helped deliver the Senate to the GOP, according to The Guardian.
• The raid came about a month after a top official in acting attorney general Todd Blanche's office instructed prosecutors to prioritize voter fraud cases, according to the New York Times, as cited in The Guardian's report. Last fall, Frank LaRose, Ohio's top election official, referred 1,084 non-citizens who appeared to have registered in the state to the justice department, The Guardian reported, citing Reuters.
• The raid brought immediate condemnation from elected officials and other civil rights organizations. "This is an unprecedented attack on democracy: these raids must end immediately," said one official, as quoted by The Guardian.