Voter Registration Drive: What’s Biden Hiding? Mobilizing the federal government to sign people up may sound benign. Far from it. By Tarren Bragdon and Stewart Whitson
President Biden is ordering all agencies in the federal bureaucracy to “expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.” That language, from a March 2021 executive order titled “Promoting Access to Voting,” may sound benign. It isn’t, and it may conceal an abuse of power. The administration is making it difficult for the public to find out.
Promoting voter registration and participation—i.e., mobilizing voters—is an inherently political act for a partisan president. The resulting efforts can be directed at groups expected to vote for the president’s party and may take the form of pressure to support the party or its policies. A president has every right to sway potential voters on the campaign trail. He has no right to influence them using the force of the federal government.
The Constitution doesn’t grant the president authority over federal elections. It reserves that power to the states and to a lesser extent Congress. Mr. Biden’s order ignores that prohibition by expanding the role of federal agencies in elections. Congress hasn’t approved such an expansion, and election legislation Mr. Biden backs is stuck in the Senate.
The White House refuses to release the plans that various agencies created under the executive order. Agencies submitted their plans by September, yet the administration has provided only overviews of slightly more than a dozen, with little detail. Their full plans should be available, and so should those of hundreds of other agencies. With the federal government throwing its weight behind voter registration and participation, Americans have a right to see what it’s doing and which voters it’s targeting, especially with crucial midterm elections in November.
In July, the Foundation for Government Accountability submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to key agencies covered by the executive order. That includes the Justice Department—specifically the Civil Rights Division and its Voting Rights Section—as well as agencies overseeing welfare programs. Many of these programs, including food stamps and Medicaid, have recently been expanded to cover more people, who may therefore be more receptive to rewarding the administration with their votes.
Our FOIA requests focused on agencies named in a December 2020 plan by the left-wing group Demos, which bears a striking resemblance to the president’s order. Demos urged the incoming administration to turn the bureaucracy into “voter registration agencies.”
Not a single agency has provided the documents we’ve requested, and most of them haven’t responded at all. The Justice Department is a case in point. It blew past the federal requirement that it acknowledge our FOIA request within 20 days. The only note we have received—more than 200 days after we filed, and only after we followed up—indicated that our request was referred to additional staff. The department hasn’t invoked any legal exemptions, requested more time, or asked that we narrow the scope of our request, as the law requires. More than nine months after we asked for its voting-rights plans and related communications with the White House, we are still in the dark. So is America.
This week we are filing a lawsuit that seeks to right this wrong. Having exhausted all other legal remedies, we are asking the federal courts to compel the Justice Department to turn over the documents we requested within three weeks, thereby ensuring that Americans can learn if anything inappropriate is happening before they cast their midterm ballots. We aren’t yet filing suit against other agencies in the hope that a federal ruling in our favor will spur them to follow the Justice Department lead.
The administration’s stonewalling is an insult to Americans and a potential threat to election integrity. The president has no authority to push such voter registration and mobilization efforts and no right to withhold the details from the public. Americans deserve transparency and trust in the outcome of our elections.
Mr. Bragdon is president and Mr. Whitson legal director of the Foundation for Government Accountability.
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