Source: Politics<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump is escalating his crusade to exert control<\/a> of America\u2019s elections as his party barrels towards a potentially bruising midterm.<\/p>\n The Justice Department has already filed lawsuits in nearly every state to try and gain access to voter files. Trump revisited his longstanding bid to restrict mail voting, sparking a legal battle<\/a> that reached the Supreme Court. He sought to make anti-terrorism funds<\/a> for state and local governments contingent on how they administer elections. He has threatened to withhold federal election<\/a> funding from states that refuse to change voter registration forms and sparred with Republican lawmakers<\/a> over a bill to overhaul elections.<\/p>\n But with most of those efforts stalling, on Thursday, just 12 days before Election Day, the DOJ took things even further: In an extraordinary move, it asked a court to preemptively block Alaska\u2019s Senate results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, stunning current and former election officials in both parties.<\/p>\n \u201cBoy, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. It feels like a real desperation play to me, because it has got zero basis in the law,\u201d said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election law expert who was counsel to George W. Bush\u2019s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.<\/p>\n At virtually every corner, courts have rebuffed Trump\u2019s efforts, and legal experts expect the latest DOJ maneuver to have the same<\/a> outcome. The requests for voter rolls were blocked repeatedly by members of Trump\u2019s own party and struck down in court<\/a>. The attempt to restrict mail voting was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court. Federal judges blocked both the anti-terrorism and election funding efforts. The SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship at the polls, has stalled in the Senate.<\/p>\n But Trump keeps pushing, telling reporters Friday that he had personally green-lit the Alaska lawsuit: \u201cI’m the one that said ‘Do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The gambit is another sign that Trump is once again ramping up his efforts to exert greater control over how elections are administered \u2014 with officials bracing for what may come next.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there is an attempt to lay a foundation to say, \u2018If we had won these lawsuits, we would have won the election,\u2019\u201d Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and former senior Georgia elections official who sparred with Trump<\/a> over his false claims of fraud in the state in 2020, said of the Alaska lawsuit. \u201cSo, for them, filing and losing for them is the same difference, tactically speaking, potentially.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump has been claiming elections were being stolen from him since the 2016 primaries<\/a>, and his wide-ranging legal and political attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss sparked a riot at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, even as some in his party want him to move on<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe federal government is his company, and he gets to call all the shots of his company, and that’s just never how it’s been done before,\u201d said Stephen Richer, Maricopa County, Arizona\u2019s former GOP chief election official.<\/p>\n POLITICO reached out to the offices of every Republican statewide election official in America for a response to the DOJ\u2019s action in Alaska. Four declined to comment, and the rest did not respond. Their silence shows just how powerful Trump remains in the party, and how few are willing to cross him just days before November\u2019s midterms.<\/p>\n “The survival rate politically of people who oppose Donald Trump on this issue is not great if you’re Republican,\u201d said Richer, who was ousted by a more conservative Republican<\/a> in a 2024 primary after defending the county\u2019s 2020 election results against a yearslong campaign from Trump and his allies to try to prove they were rigged<\/a>.<\/p>\n Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes railed against the DOJ\u2019s lawsuit, accusing the department of \u201cworking as the president’s lawyers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Department of Justice is acting in a monstrously political way, and it’s purely inappropriate, and they lose a lot of credibility by putting their thumb on the scales,\u201d Fontes said in an interview Friday afternoon. \u201cThis attempt in Alaska, if it comes to Arizona, will also fail.\u201d<\/p>\n The Justice Department, in a statement posted on social media<\/a>, said “claims that DOJ is trying to stop Alaska\u2019s election are FALSE.” Instead, the DOJ argued it was “seeking to protect election integrity, consistent with the National Voter Registration Act (enacted by Congress) and ensure the will of Alaska voters is respected.”<\/p>\n Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, described the legal filing in Alaska as \u201cpart of a concerted effort to control the election and to try to dictate the outcome in Donald Trump and the Republican Party\u2019s favor.\u201d<\/p>\n Brown said he worried the administration would contest the results of the midterms.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is not hypothetical,\u201d Brown said. \u201cThis is what the president has done for years now, and he has the entire power of government, and most importantly, the Department of Justice around elections, acting at his request.\u201d<\/p>\n Sterling predicted the effort would backfire on the GOP.<\/p>\n \u201cBy talking about stolen elections, by talking about cheating, they’re suppressing their own vote and they’re encouraging the votes of their opponents,\u201d he said. \u201cSo tactically, I think it’s politically moronic.\u201d<\/p>\n The DOJ lawsuit in Alaska comes less than two weeks before a midterm election cycle in which Republicans are bracing for losses across the map<\/a>. And the Trump administration\u2019s increasing interventions are raising questions about how far his administration intends to go in trying to assert federal authority over elections that by law are run by state and local officials.<\/p>\n A current Georgia Republican election official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations around the Alaska lawsuit, said they are prepared to forcefully push back on any action from the federal government.<\/p>\n \u201cBring it on,\u201d the official said. \u201cI think there’s zero credible way for any entity, much less the DOJ, to say that the election results in Georgia are suspect.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawsuit is the culmination of years of escalating tensions between the federal government and state election officials over election proceedings.<\/p>\n In February<\/a>, a typically staid gathering of the nation\u2019s top election officials turned fiery when Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican and her state\u2019s chief election official, confronted a senior White House aide over the DOJ\u2019s voter roll push.<\/p>\n The DOJ \u201cpretty much slandered all of us to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and that the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK,\u201d Henderson said to White House Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Jared Borg, as her colleagues and reporters looked on.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, Henderson\u2019s office received a letter<\/a> from the Justice Department informing her that election monitors will be sent to her state. Her office responded the next day by distributing instructions<\/a> to poll workers noting that the DOJ observers \u201cmust not interfere with voting\u201d and giving guidance in case \u201ca situation arises involving law enforcement or legal demands.\u201d<\/p>\n