With bad news rolling in on all fronts, it should come as no surprise that the first week of the new administration shows that election integrity and voting rights are once again on the firing line.

Disaster Relief Extortion: With wildfires still blazing in Los Angeles County, Trump threatened to withhold federal aid from California unless the state adopts strict voter ID requirements. Despite extensive evidence showing that voter fraud remains virtually nonexistent, Trump continues to push for voter ID laws and other measures that would make it harder for citizens to cast their vote, not easier.

Governor Newsom’s press office responded with a quick fact check noting that “under current CA law you must be a CA resident and US citizen (and attest to being one under penalty of perjury) AND provide a form of ID such as driver’s license or passport that has been approved by the Secretary of State in order to register to vote.” Moreover, “15 states do not generally require voter ID at polls, including Nevada and Pennsylvania (two states won by President Trump).”

Civil Rights Freeze: Also last week, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered its civil rights division to freeze the pursuit of new cases, indictments or settlements, reports the Washington Post. The Civil Rights Division enforces critical laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, national origin, disability status, sex, religion, familial status, and it is also the key agency tasked with protecting voting rights and fair representation.

A disfunctional Civil Rights Division will result in real harms to real people, including here in Wisconsin. For the 2024 election, the Civil Rights Division pursued a case against Wisconsin’s Town of Thornapple after they discontinued the use of any electronic voting equipment, depriving disabled voters of the ability to vote privately and independently. The federal case paralleled a state case filed by Law Forward, and these actions protected the rights of disabled voters in time for the 2024 election.

“It’s beyond unusual — it’s unprecedented. We’ve never seen this before at this scale with any transfer of power, regardless of the ideology of any incoming president or administration,” said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “This should make Americans both angry and deeply worried.”

Foxes in the Henhouse: Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ Civil Rights Division, California attorney and Republican insider Harmeet Dhillon, called on the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in favor of Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 elections in several key swing states. Her law firm, Dhillon Law Group, represented the RNC in a lawsuit against California’s plan to proactively mail ballots to every registered voter during the pandemic. It also represented the California GOP in an effort to ban the practice of allowing volunteers to gather voters’ absentee ballots and return them themselves. Allegations of “unclean” voter rolls and “ballot harvesting” are regularly lobbed against Democratic jurisdictions, including here in Wisconsin.

As recently as 2024, Dhillon questioned how elections were being administered by swing states including Wisconsin. “The hanky panky goes on in the urban counties of these swing states,” she said on a podcast, where she alleged “a wholesale ignoring of the laws passed by legislatures” aided and abetted by the judiciary.

Similarly, Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ, Pam Bondi is an ardent election denier touting “evidence of cheating,” “fake ballots” and dead voters in Pennsylvania on Fox News in 2020, as votes were being counted, claims later rejected by the Pennsylvania and U.S. Supreme Courts. Under her predecessor William Barr, the DOJ did little to protect voting rights and brought a handful of cases defending voting restrictions. However, Barr notably contradicted Trump in the end, declaring publicly that the DOJ had found no evidence of widespread election fraud that could change the results of the election and revealing that “Trump knew well that he had lost the election.”