Interim D.C. U.S. Lawyer Ed Martin goes to research voter fraud, and given the monster that Martin is, he’s most likely going to search out some regardless of its nonexistence. He has spun up what he’s pompously calling “Particular Unit: Election Accountability” as if he’s helming a “Legislation & Order” spinoff.
Martin is rising as one of many dumbest villains within the villain-stuffed Trump administration. Partially, that’s as a result of he’s exceptionally unqualified to be a U.S. legal professional, having no expertise in any way that will warrant making him the highest prosecutor for the nation’s capital.
Martin’s previous work is restricted to writing pro-Trump rubbish with conservative anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and unsuccessfully operating for elected workplace in Missouri. What Martin does have expertise in, nonetheless, is being a true-blue election denier who was current on Jan. 6 after which turned the protection legal professional for a number of insurrectionists.
Since taking workplace, he has helped a GOP congressman keep away from home violence fees, threatened an elected Democrat who referred to as Elon Musk a “dick,” and, in his function as prosecutor, dismissed felony fees for a J6 rioter he nonetheless represented as protection counsel. Sadly, that’s what counts for related experience on this administration.
If Martin’s plan to research elections sounds acquainted, it’s as a result of throughout his first administration, Trump created the Presidential Advisory Fee on Election Integrity. He stuffed it to the gills with voter suppression fans like then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Kobach has spent his career making an attempt to make it tougher for folks to vote, and he was primed to search out rampant fraud in the course of the 2016 election. The fee lasted solely seven months earlier than Trump shuttered it, maybe as a result of it didn’t find any proof of the widespread voter fraud Trump was determined to search out.
In comparison with Martin, although, Kobach is a mere novice. Martin solely has his present job due to his devotion to “the massive lie” and his involvement within the “Stop the Steal” motion. He’ll be pushed to unearth voter fraud despite the fact that study after study after study has discovered it to be vanishingly uncommon. An Related Press review of six swing states from the 2020 election discovered 475 potential voter fraud instances out of greater than 25 million ballots solid.
When he introduced the election accountability unit, Martin additionally mentioned he had already opened one investigation. In fact, neither he nor anybody else within the administration will say what that investigation is, with Martin as a substitute musing about that point 20 years in the past when he discovered some unspecified voter fraud in Missouri.
It isn’t even clear whether or not Martin, as a U.S. legal professional for D.C. solely, would have the authority to conduct a nationwide investigation into voter fraud. Even when the earlier Voter Fraud Fee was created by the president, at the least 44 states refused to supply a lot of the voter information demanded, largely as a result of the fee demanded confidential information.
In fact, the failure of the unique Voter Fraud Fee occurred earlier than Trump’s 2020 loss and the widespread GOP acceptance of “the massive lie.” Lots of Republican-led states might have discovered Trump’s 2017 demand to traipse by way of their voter information an overreach. However now that election denial is the default place of many election officials and Republican candidates, conservatives will doubtless be far more inclined to help in Martin’s undertaking.
Whereas Martin is pretending that nonexistent voter fraud is threatening the integrity of U.S. elections, Trump is busy dismantling the elements of the federal government that truly shield elections. Trump has tried to remove Federal Elections Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a longtime champion of precise election integrity efforts resembling combatting the corrosive effects of darkish cash on elections.
Trump additionally kneecapped the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, which assisted and trained state election officers on every thing from cyberattacks to the security of their staff. In February, the administration put 17 CISA workers on administrative depart, together with folks employed to fight overseas affect in elections. Trump additionally slashed funding, so there’ll now not be funding for assessing or responding to cyberthreats or working with state authorities officers.
As an alternative of serving to to protect elections towards digital assaults and manipulation by overseas actors, Trump goes to have Musk handle everything. One way or the other voting will occur with out computer systems as a result of Elon informed him that “computer systems are usually not meant for voting, it’s simply not good, it’s too many transactions going down, too shortly.”
The administration has comprehensively rejected any accountability to maintain U.S. elections protected from precise hazards. The 2024 election noticed a massive number of tried cyberattacks on election web sites. China, Iran, and Russia all tried to interfere within the 2024 election.
Now the nation is susceptible to these very actual threats whereas Martin pushes the very not actual menace of voter fraud. In the meantime, hackers and overseas actors are going to have a discipline day.
