In the Press

Alexandra Chandler is director of Impact Programs, Free and Fair Elections at Project Democracy.

If the Department of Justice seizes ballots, voting machines and other election materials on election night or shortly after, that could seriously disrupt the legally required post-election processes governing the canvassing, counting, and certification of races, and potentially break chain of custody over ballots in a way that could fuel conspiracy theories and make it difficult to declare a widely accepted winner.

Election officials can and should prepare now for this scenario.

Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat.

On Tuesday I emailed with Ian Bassin at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that, well, helps protect democracy. He shared a different proposal for state legislation designed to hold federal officials accountable for violating constitutional rights.

It’s called the Universal Constitutional Remedies Act, and it’s a state law that would grant citizens the right to sue federal, state or local officials in state court for violations of the federal Constitution.

As Bassin explained via email, the constitutional theory behind the law is that “federal law only supersedes state law ​​when federal authority is exercised ‘in pursuance’ of the Constitution. And unconstitutional acts are the definition of acts not taken ‘in pursuance’ of the Constitution.”

“The DNI was created to be a high-level intelligence coordinator, not a field operator. By personally participating in a raid and acting as a switchboard for the president, Gabbard has traded her statutory mandate for a partisan performance,” Alexandra Chandler, director of Impact Programs, Free and Fair Elections, Protect Democracy, told Newsweek on Monday.

“This invites damning claims of undue influence and selective prosecution, effectively handing a roadmap to the defense in a future case. When the lines between national intelligence, domestic law enforcement, and the president’s personal grudges are so erased, any resulting prosecution looks less like the rule of law and more like a political hit.”