Wednesday, July 2

On a call with volunteers, the leader of an influential group of grassroots conservative activists laid out a plan for how to get the SAVE Act, the GOP’s monster voter suppression bill, through the Senate and onto Trump’s desk. Also in this week’s Eye on the Right: A top Justice Department official told a prominent MAGA leader about DOJ’s plan to weaponize federal voting law to force states “one by one” to “police their rolls.” And Cleta Mitchell, the far-right lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, wants to force states to turn their voter records over to the federal government for aggressive purging.

I’m filling in this week for Matt Cohen, who is out on a well-deserved vacation. As always, thanks for reading. 

— Zachary Roth, Managing Editor

Join Marc Elias and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker live tonight at 5 p.m. ET! Get behind-the-scenes access, connect in the chat and be part of the conversation on the future of democracy. Upgrade now to register.

Anti-Voting Activists Definitely Haven’t Given Up on Passing the SAVE Act

Since the U.S. House passed the SAVE Act back in April, the GOP’s monster voter suppression bill has fallen out of the headlines somewhat.

The measure — which would require people registering to vote to show documentary proof of citizenship, potentially disenfranchising millions of Americans — represents the worst attack on voting rights in American history, historians told Democracy Docket. But it appears doomed in the Senate, where it lacks the votes to overcome an all-but-certain Democratic filibuster. 

Still, don’t breathe easy just yet — because some of the most influential right-wing activists certainly haven’t given up on the SAVE Act. In fact, they’re ramping up a major campaign this summer to pressure lawmakers into getting around the filibuster and forcing the measure onto President Donald Trump’s desk.

In an organizing meeting held Monday on Zoom and listened to by Democracy Docket, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin explained the strategy: Use grassroots pressure to convince lawmakers to attach the SAVE Act to must-pass legislation later this year — probably either a continuing resolution spending bill or the defense funding bill, known as the National Defense Reauthorization Act — which might be hard for Democrats to sustain a filibuster on.

“We’ve learned over the course of our movement that when you want to get something done, you have to attach it to must-pass legislation,” Martin explained.

“We need to get the SAVE Act and the requirement for proof of citizenship to register to vote added to that must-pass piece of legislation that will move thru Congress in September,” Martin added. “In order to do that, we're going to have to build more momentum to get attention for this particular effort.”

To build that momentum, the group will launch “Only Citizens Vote Month” in August. Volunteers will hold rallies, knock on doors, gather to wave signs, and host meetups aimed at showing Congress that there’s grassroots momentum behind the GOP bill. 

Speaker Mike Johnson attached the SAVE Act to a budget bill last year, but removed it after that bill failed to pass the House. It’s not yet clear whether the plan will work this time around — though with Republicans now controlling the Senate and White House as well, it would definitely stand a better chance. 

But what’s notable is that Martin and her allies aren’t playing around. 

“This is truly an effort to get this passed into law,” Martin, who stood outside the Capitol with a bullhorn on January 6, 2021, told the volunteer activists at the meeting. “I’m tired of messaging bills. I’m tired of things where we don’t win and we don’t finish the job. This is something we should be able to win with and we should be able to finish the job on.” 

“It isn’t just, like, a petition to grow our list or something like that,” Martin continued. “It is truly something we want to make a difference with.”

It’s worth noting that the Tea Party Patriots aren’t some fringe group that doesn’t understand how Washington works. Launched not long after former President Barack Obama took office, they have a record of mobilizing large numbers of conservative voters, and they enjoy relationships with key Republican lawmakers. Martin talks knowledgeably about often-confusing legislative procedure, and she was among the conservative leaders who spoke at a press conference led by Johnson last year to promote an earlier version of the SAVE Act.

So if Martin and her group think the SAVE Act is still worth fighting for, then those who understand the harm it would do probably ought to keep fighting too.

DOJ Official to MAGA Leader: We’ll Target States That Won’t ‘Police’ Their Voter Rolls

For months, we’ve been tracking how the Department of Justice has shifted under Trump from fighting to protect and defend voting rights to working instead in support of more restrictive voting rules.

The key figure in that transition has been Harmeet Dhillon, the far-right legal activist who now leads DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Under Dhillon, the division has launched a series of actions accusing North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Orange County, California of failing to maintain or hand over voter registration records in violation of federal law. 

Last week, Dhillon spoke with the prominent MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, and offered a little more information about the June 25 lawsuit against Orange County, which is based on a complaint suggesting a non-citizen had been registered to vote.

“Every citizen is entitled to their vote being counted once and being counted equally,” Dhillon told Kirk. “And that’s not happening in any jurisdiction that is refusing to police their voter rolls and clean their voter rolls when they get a complaint like this that shows that there are non-citizens on the voter rolls.”

“So we asked [Orange County] … ‘hey guys, can you show us the data that we’re entitled to under this federal law?’” Dhillon continued. “And they refused to give it to us. So this lawsuit followed today.”

In fact, Democracy Docket obtained emails showing that Orange County election administrators offered to give DOJ the records it sought. But, citing California privacy laws, the county asked the department to promise to keep voters’ sensitive personal information confidential.

DOJ officials never responded to the offer, instead filing the lawsuit the next day.

“And that’s going to happen to other jurisdictions that are refusing to comply with the Help America Vote Act,” Dhillon continued. “We’ve sent letters out to other jurisdictions ... We’ve asked them to preserve their evidence and we are asking for this information. So one by one we’re going to make sure that states are compliant.”

In a post on X promoting the interview, Dhillon made the message even clearer. 

“Any state or jurisdiction that refuses to comply with the Help America Vote Act will be met with lawsuits from @CivilRights,” she wrote.

Cleta Mitchell Urges EAC Not to Stop at Trump’s Anti-Voting Order

Key provisions of Trump’s restrictive executive order on voting may have been blocked, for now, by two different federal courts. But it’s still a focus for plenty of anti-voting activism. 

On Monday, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released the comments it received after asking the public for input on how to implement the order. Among the comments was a detailed, six-page letter submitted in April by the Election Integrity Network, the prominent far-right group founded and led by the conservative lawyer and close Trump ally Cleta Mitchell.

Of course, Mitchell wrote in support of the order’s requirement to add proof of citizenship requirements to the national voter registration form. But she went much further. 

She said the EAC should “work aggressively” on a broad effort to have states turn over their voter rolls “to be compared to federal databases.” The goal would be to remove from the rolls not only “noncitizens, dead registrants, and other ineligible registrations,” but also “registrations that have less than full legal names and special or foreign characters.”

Mitchell also urged the EAC to add to the federal registration form state-specific legal requirements for voting, “such as status as a felon, adjudication of mental incompetence, specific requirements for a valid registration address, etc.” 

“The failure of the federal form to acknowledge and reflect state specific voter registration requirements must be corrected once and for all,” she wrote.

The form also should include a "signature attestation on every form whereby the registrant revokes all prior voter registrations," Mitchell added.

The polished legal and technical language of Mitchell’s letter might lead us to forget that she was among the very few most important players in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Her role included being on the infamous call where he tried to strong-arm Georgia’s top election official into rigging his state’s results in Trump’s favor. 

Of course, anyone can submit a public comment. But it’s worth asking why someone who worked to subvert the results of a democratic election should expect to have their input respectfully considered by EAC staff as a good-faith effort to improve election administration.