In recent months, the Trump administration and the Justice Department have tried to exert federal control over elections that states normally run, and courts have blocked or rejected nearly all of those efforts. PBS News took up the issue on election night with two experts on election law and security.
Geoff Bennett outlined the steps the department has taken. It has sued states including California and Alaska, threatened to prosecute local election officials, tried to curb mail-in voting and sought sensitive voter information from nearly every state.
Rick Hasen, a law professor who directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, said the lawsuits were a way of "testing the waters." A win, he said, would have been a green light for similar moves in other close races. He noted that the Supreme Court on Monday quickly rejected an appeal over setting aside 20,000 ballots in California. If the effort continues, he said, it is "more of a political strategy than a legal strategy."
Juliette Kayyem, a former Homeland Security assistant secretary now at the Harvard Kennedy School, said the courts holding firm is reassuring but is not the whole picture. She said fraud claims undermine faith in elections and can radicalize some people. She also pointed to the threat of immigration enforcement deployments and to the department's plan to send 1,000 election monitors.
Hasen said a bigger worry was the report of criminal target letters sent to Democratic lawyers in the Alaska Senate case. Kayyem warned that federal seizure of ballots before a count could break the chain of custody.
Hasen said judges across the political spectrum have held the line. He added that states' control of elections has helped, and that "the center so far has held."
Sources: PBS News