How Trump Made the DOJ Division That Keeps Elections Safe

When David Becker he applied for his dream job as a lawyer to Department of Justice Voting Division, he never thought he would get it—not because he was a bad lawyer, but because it was one of the most sought-after jobs in the country.

“It was one of the most important projects,” Becker, now director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, tells WIRED. “I knew there would be thousands of people who signed up.”

The Voting Division, part of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, was established following the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. For the next sixty years, the attorneys who worked there focused on ensuring that every American has the right to vote. This means enforcing the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, representing the United States in court to block elections. When most of the cases were very highmost of the work that lawyers did involved a fraction of the population, work that no one was willing or able to do.

Against all odds, Becker got the job, and it was everything he hoped it would be. He worked there for seven years, from 1998 to 2005. He said: “I felt very privileged to work with the best lawyers I have ever seen in my life.

But, as I write in my latest piece for WIREDover the past year, the Trump administration has dismantled the Vote Division, a facility that one expert described as “the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Commission.” The administration has removed decades of experience by forcing out more than a dozen attorneys and replacing them with a group of loyalists who appear to be serving the White House’s agenda of tampering with the election.

Becker, like the other twelve former Votes Section judges and experts I spoke for the past three months, not very sad about what has happened, but angry that the work done on behalf of the most vulnerable people in the US area is no longer happening.

A former DOJ attorney who spent years in the Voting Division before being fired last year, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled a case he worked on in a small town in the southern US where black voters were discriminated against.

“The black part of town had bad roads,” he told WIRED. “They would not have representatives because they had elections for all the cities, and (the city had) never elected a person of color.” Now (after the DOJ job) there is a certain type of person in the city government.

Over the past 12 months, attorneys within the Voting Division have been suing states to to find their unaltered voting rollsas part of what critics fear is the administration’s broader push to prevent large swathes of the population from voting. Meanwhile, the courts are back, but Trump and his allies are showing up in order to push these policies it doesn’t matter. And with the midterm elections coming up in November, former DOJ lawyers are worried.

read more about the demise of this once-defunct corner of the US government, and let me know what you think in the comments.

This is a copy of The Inner Loop Story. Read previous articles Here.