Marc Elias: Trump Wants to Say That There Are Millions of Non-Citizens Voting, to Use the DoJ to Threaten State Officials to Adopt That Line

RUSH EXCERPT:
ELIAS: "Yeah. So this is why I said like, it depends how you view this ruling. Right. The narrow view of this ruling is, you know, don’t worry too much because this will flag a handful of U.S. citizens and they’ll be disenfranchized. Now, that is an extraordinary position for people to take that somehow that is not a big deal. But I am much less optimistic than that. I, I think that the reason why they are doing this is because Donald Trump wants to say there are hundreds of thousands, millions of non-citizens who are voting, and he wants to use the Justice Department to threaten state officials to adopt that line. So we’ve already, you know, we’ve already seen that the Department of Justice has said, under Donald Trump’s latest executive order that they are going to prioritize the criminal investigation of prosecution of election officials, of election officials. So what’s going to happen here, Nicole, is that the same database is going to tell a state that you have 150,000 non-citizens voting, and that will be preposterously untrue. Some number of states, you know, let’s say just call it Texas and Florida. They will gleefully adopt that and say, great, we’re kicking all those people off the rolls. Other states will say we’re not adopting it. And then Todd Blanche will say, okay, we’re criminally investigating you. At which point local election officials will be like, well, what do I do? Do I go with what the state is saying and risk a criminal investigation, or do I just disenfranchize voters? And then finally, you know, we act as if Tina Peters and people like her are one offs, but there are election deniers in election offices throughout this country, and they will misuse this database to disenfranchize voters. And so this is not, in my view, intended to just get rid of, you know, the few bad apples, if those apples even exist. This is aimed to do much more than that. There was just a New York Times article, I think, this morning, and I forget the exact numbers, but the headline was something like, you know, in Nevada, the Trump Administration flagged 175 000 people. And then it became, I think, like 180, and now it’s zero or something. I’m sure I have these numbers. Or maybe it was 16000 and then 175 and then zero. But like these things get whittled down and, and this there’s not a lot of time to whittle down. And, and, and the Trump Administration is not going to let states remove names without there being a threat of criminal prosecution over them."