Experts alarmed as Trump launches broad-front attack on US voting rights

People vote at a polling station in Los Angeles earlier this month. The administration has launched a multi-pronged push to change voting rules. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty View image in fullscreen People vote at a polling station in Los Angeles earlier this month. The administration has launched a multi-pronged push to change voting rules. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Experts alarmed as Trump launches broad-front attack on US voting rights With election denialists installed in key positions, officials using series of measures to change voting rules The Trump administration is waging war on voting rights using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations, and an executive order to limit voting by mail, moves mirroring the US president’s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials. Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the DoJ, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. The justice department has also filed lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from 30 states – even though, by law, states control elections – and the FBI has launched investigations into debunked allegations of voting fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin and a few other swing states that Trump lost in 2020. Trump in late March this year issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed without evidence contribute to fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder. The administration’s multi-pronged push to change voting rules is under way despite laws that empower states and Congress to set election rules, sparking lawsuits from states and nonpartisan voting rights groups. In early April, for instance, officials from 23 Democratic states including California and Washington DC filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s executive order to curb voting by mail, arguing that the order was an unconstitutional effort to interfere with states’ administering their elections. The administration’s aggressive steps to tighten voting rules come as Trump and many Republican allies have voiced strong fears that the November midterm elections are likely to give Democrats control of the House, and possibly the Senate too, limiting Trump’s powers and possibly leading to his impeachment again. At a Republican House retreat in January, Trump stressed the stakes are high for his future if Democrats win control of the House. “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be … I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told lawmakers. Former federal officials with voting expertise are sharply critical of the Trump administration’s moves to limit voting rights with phony charge