It’s essential to understand that this isn’t about protecting the integrity of elections from people who don’t have the right to vote. This is a suppression effort meant to intimidate people who do have the legal right to vote by making it seem like it might be better to sit out the mid-terms than be accosted by federal officers just because they don’t seem white enough to vote.
A lot of noise has been made for several years now by Donald Trump about “rigged” or “stolen” elections. Despite winning two of the last three presidential elections, Trump insists the system is out to get him. He says no one should trust the system unless it elects him, and even when it does, it’s still a rigged system because it forced him to serve two non-consecutive terms.
Propelled by the administration’s overriding animus against anyone liberal and/or non-white, Trump has been claiming the nation is drowning in illegal votes cast by migrants who don’t have the legal right to vote. The administration has funneled time and money into generating evidence of these obviously false claims. And there’s been no return on this investment. For example, it only took a couple of weeks for the DOJ’s claims of illegal voters in Nevada to drop from 16,000 to 285 to zero.
California is a favorite target of Trump’s. And so California is seeing similar efforts to make a case that simply can’t be made. But that hasn’t stopped the DOJ and DHS from touting supposedly alarming numbers that are actually anything but, as the administration looks for ways to arrest people who are actually in this country legally, but don’t fit the demographic Trump caters to.
Here’s the latest on Trump’s new wave of futile aggressions, as reported by the Associated Press:
Federal authorities charged more than two dozen foreign nationals Monday in California as part of a statewide sweep targeting people who officials say have illegally registered or voted in U.S. elections.
[…]
The Justice Department said the 28 people who were charged as part of a sweep dubbed Operation Protect the Vote are lawful permanent residents — but not U.S. citizens who are permitted to legally vote. They are charged with crimes including making false statements on a naturalization application and submitting fraudulent voter registrations.
28 voters? Oh my. I mean, this might mean something if a sweep was performed in some one horse town (to use obsolete vernacular) where the newly installed mayor had won by a suddenly suspicious 27 votes. But we’re talking about California, which has (as of last October) [squints at official report] 23,092,098 registered voters. That’s a percentage I’m not even going to do the math on because surely anyone knows that this means there are likely 23,092,070 people legally allowed to vote in California.
What this fact does tell us is that the administration is willing to spend hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of federal dollars to seek out and arrest people who could never have swayed an election and who, in most cases, probably were just unclear on the rules, especially after many states decided to fold in voter registration with the state ID/drivers license process.
Here’s the DOJ pretending it has done literally anything with these expended resources:
“This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens,” Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, said during a news conference in Los Angeles.
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything to anything. It’s such a small percentage you’d have to drastically alter a spreadsheet’s numerical display to reflect the percentage of “illegal” voters. If there’s anything doing “real damage” to elections and American citizens, it’s the administration that definitely plans to use these 28 arrests to justify federal interference in the election process.
Most people — especially those who love Trump and believe any fucking thing that falls out of his mouth — likely expected there to be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “illegal” voters in California. The DOJ manages to come up with twenty-eight.
Even if you want to believe California’s rookie illegal voting numbers are just symptomatic of a larger problem, you’re going to look just as stupid as the DOJ itself.
The Justice Department said Monday it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration offenses over the last seven weeks.
So, a little under six people per state. And that’s across the United States, which has [checks the stats] nearly 230 million registered voters. All this is proving is that the DOJ is just an extension of Trump’s id and that it has no problem spending millions to lock a few hundred people up for the often-accidental “crime” of mistakenly registering to vote. In most of these cases, there’s no evidence any of those who “illegally” registered to vote actually cast any votes.
And yet, the DOJ and DHS are treating this like a high-level crime worth expending all the resources they can throw at it. DHS officers performing quasi-raids to round up these “worst of the worst” criminals. I would hope the government knows exactly how ridiculous it looks.
Esmeralda Muñoz, 70, said her family was furious that agents showed up to their home in full tactical gear with guns drawn to arrest her husband before dawn.
“It’s a show for them,” she said, calling it a “shame” that government officials arrived with camera crews and news helicopters.
She’s not lying. The DHS itself posted footage of this “raid.” (More coverage here if you’d rather not click thru to X.com.)
But the real punchline comes in the next paragraph:
Omar Muñoz is a legal permanent resident, she said, and they didn’t realize that he was registered to vote. When they do talk about politics, Esmeralda said Omar has been a vociferous supporter of Trump.
lol lmao even…
Bet that changes. An administration stocked with bigoted death cult nihilists is reaping the whirlwind. It starts with gas prices and ends with Trump locking up his own supporters because he only likes the ones who are white. The GOP is nearing a midterm that will likely flip the House and has no succession plan in place other than “whoever can weather the most face-eatings from the leopards in their party.”
And as much as I want to laugh loudly and (ultimately) hollowly, it doesn’t really matter whether or not the DOJ arrests 10 people or 10,000 people. The real reason for this show of force is to keep non-white people from voting, even if they — like Omar Munoz — are Trump supporters.
