JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The Justice Department's guiding manual says the department should generally avoid interfering with election administration. Now, under President Trump, this Justice Department seems to take a different view. The department has taken numerous steps this year and in recent days to wade into elections. This includes new and unprecedented lawsuits filed in California and Alaska. I'm joined now by NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas and NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks. Hi to both of you.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Hi there.
SUMMERS: Ryan, let's start with you. Traditionally, what has the Department of Justice's role been when it comes to election season?
LUCAS: Well, there are some things that the Justice Department has done for a long time, for decades, like sending election monitors to states to protect the right to vote, to make sure there's no discrimination or intimidation, for example, at the polls. It also investigates and prosecutes election fraud, things like ballot destruction, vote buying and so on.
But in general, the Justice Department really wants to stay out of the headlines when it comes to election season. It traditionally has wanted to avoid any possibility of even being seen as putting its thumb on the election scale, so to speak. But this Justice Department in Trump's second term has been all over the headlines, making big election-related announcements, filing lawsuits, like you mentioned. It's really just not something that we've seen from a Justice Department before.
SUMMERS: OK, let's get a little bit more specific here. Miles, over to you. We - we're days to go until voting ends here. The Department of Justice has filed lawsuits in California and Alaska. They're asking courts to intervene in how elections run. Let's start with California, if we can. What is the latest?
PARKS: Right. So this is the case where the federal government says it's found 20,000 likely noncitizens on California's voter rolls. Now, local officials in California are skeptical. The ones who have started to look at this list say it seems to be unreliable. But the DOJ wants the state to segregate any vote by mail ballots associated with these 20,000 people until their citizenship has been verified.
Election law experts do not expect this lawsuit to succeed. It was just filed so late in the election process among other reasons. But even if it doesn't succeed, this is probably not the end of the story with this state. The DOJ is promising, quote, "significant federal scrutiny" of local officials who also don't comply with their requests.
SUMMERS: OK. That's California. Tell us about Alaska.
PARKS: So in this one, the DOJ is asking a court to delay certification in the state Senate race if the incumbent Republican senator running, Dan Sullivan, loses by a small margin. The reasoning is that there's another Dan Sullivan who's on the ballot, and that could potentially confuse people. But election officials in the state already brought up this issue, and the Alaska Supreme Court already weighed in earlier this year, saying the second Dan Sullivan is allowed to run.
Generally, the legal community actually views this case as even weaker than the California case, which is saying something. I've been keeping a running list of things that legal experts have said or written about this legal filing in Alaska from the DOJ - absolute bollocks, completely meritless, one of the dumbest lawsuits by the federal government I've ever seen. That is just a sampling.
SUMMERS: Those are some choice quotes there. I mean, so it sounds unlikely, but, Ryan, at the same time, the Department of Justice has also been announcing charges against non-U.S. citizens for election crimes. What can you tell us about these people?
LUCAS: All right. Look, basically, in the past couple months, the DOJ has announced more than a hundred cases against noncitizens for alleged voting crimes. This is very much part of a public push by the Justice Department to talk up these cases. It says this is all about election integrity and preventing noncitizen votes from canceling out the votes of U.S. citizens. This effort, of course, dovetails with the lawsuit that Miles was just talking about in California.
Now, I have gone through court documents for 64 of these 100-plus noncitizen voting cases, and what I found is that at least 56 of these defendants are legal, permanent residents. In other words, they are green card holders - people who are here legally - whereas, the number of folks who are in the U.S. illegally who have been charged in these sorts of cases, I could count on one hand.
PARKS: And it's worth noting, Juana, this does not align with what President Trump and many others on the right have said for years about this issue, you know, that this is happening in mass in some way. Remember, we're talking about a hundred or so people, but in the last election, more than 100 million votes were cast. President Trump has also said numerous times that he thinks people who are in the country illegally are the ones voting. But what we're talking about here in the vast majority of cases are people who are in the country legally.
SUMMERS: So what exactly are these people being charged with?
LUCAS: Well, the most common charge in these cases is a misdemeanor charge of voting by an alien. And what's really interesting here is earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida found that statute to be unconstitutional. So the main charge that the Justice Department is using in these cases is on shaky legal footing.
The other question, of course, that pops up with this is why a noncitizen might have registered to vote or voted in a U.S. election. And the picture that emerges in these court documents is really a smattering of reasons. In some cases, people thought they could vote as a green card holder. Some people registered through their state DMV. One woman thought she was a U.S. citizen. So court papers really don't paint a picture of some sort of vast conspiracy to have illegal voters sway an election. It often just appears to be a mistake.
SUMMERS: I mean, perhaps this is a super obvious question, but it does make you wonder, why is this all happening? Why is the Justice Department so focused on this? And why are they filing things that seem likely to fail in court?
PARKS: I mean, the general thinking in the election community is that this is really more about messaging and building this cloud of doubt over the entire elections process. Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, has been calling this preemptive election interference. He told me that the DOJ's actions could be laying a narrative groundwork that could be used by anyone who wants to contest certification or the seating of Congress.
STEVE VLADECK: In that universe, the goal of these lawsuits is not to persuade anybody. It's just to provide enough of a fig leaf on which to base a refusal to certify, a refusal to seat or some other action that would stand athwart the will of a Democratic majority of the people of a particular state.
PARKS: Now, legal experts I talked to still feel confident that the courts would snuff out any effort like that. But the closer the margins are, and especially if a majority in either Chamber of Congress comes down to one or two seats, those hypotheticals start feeling a little bit more likely.
SUMMERS: NPR's Miles Parks and Ryan Lucas. Thank you.
PARKS: Thank you.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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