The NAACP has asked a federal judge to compel the Trump administration to release documents about an anticipated “unprecedented deployment of federal officials” at the polls, less than 30 days before the midterm elections.
The group’s lawsuit, filed Friday against the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, argues there is an “urgent need for the Defendant to produce and release the records and information” about a plan to deploy “1,000 election monitors.” The records, the NAACP says, would “shed light” on the effort.
The plaintiff alleges the administration is “searching for evidence related to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud” instead of “ensuring access for voters.”
The complaint also points to concerns raised about monitors in earlier elections. “The actions of the current Civil Rights Division’s monitors have raised widespread concerns from state officials and voters. For example, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon described the Justice Department’s monitors’ behavior during his state’s primary elections as ‘aggressive’ and ‘irregular,’ and that the monitors’ behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was,'” the filing said. “There have been reported issues, too, of DOJ not providing notice and obtaining consent from state and local officials.”
The filing also targets one monitor by name. “One DOJ ‘election monitor’ who was stationed in Minnesota, David Michael Levin, reportedly pleaded guilty in 2016 to illegally hacking a government election website in Florida as a part of a scheme to promote baseless claims regarding the ‘integrity of elections,'” court documents added.
Like a pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) records, the new case was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan.
Sooknanan, a Joe Biden appointee, previously blocked the administration from implementing its “modified” system for “voter verification.” The U.S. Supreme Court has since stayed that order, which the DOJ had called “indefensible.”
The NAACP wants Sooknanan to act on an “emergency” basis and grant a writ of mandamus compelling the DOJ to “gather the records and produce them in response to the pending FOIA request at issue in this Complaint.” Without that, the suit asserts, the DOJ “will effectively run out the clock on this request[.]”
The records sought include the “legal authority, if any” the DOJ is relying on to “deploy ‘election monitors,'” records “reflecting any final legal advice and analysis,” records of complaints from the public about the monitors, “[c]omprehensive list of locations of deployment,” training materials, “names, employment, department, and job titles of all election monitors deployed,” and more.
Earlier Monday, Dhillon posted “right on” and shared a video of U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche claiming the monitoring complained of is “not unique to this Department of Justice.” Dhillon has likewise said this is “something that DOJ does.”
On Monday evening, Sooknanan ordered the DOJ and NAACP to “meet, confer,” and file by 5 p.m. Tuesday a proposed briefing schedule and a “statement addressing whether a hearing on the motion is necessary, and if so, three proposed dates and times for such a hearing.”
“Any disagreements should be noted in the Joint Status Report,” the judge said.