President Trump’s Department of Justice is proving that it won’t play around with a legal blitz focused on protecting election integrity, enforcing federal election laws, and investigating voting-related crimes, stemming from an executive order issued by the president in March 2025 that could stop newly red states from turning blue again.
For background, on June 23, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania asking him to release 14 different categories of voting-related information in an effort to uphold election integrity. Moreover, press accounts confirmed that election officials in Arizona, Colorado, and Wisconsin, all notable swing states, also received similar letters.
In its letter to Secretary Schmidt, the DOJ requested that the secretary provide information on “the process by which registrants who are ineligible to vote due to non-citizenship are identified and removed from the statewide voter registration list,” zeroing in on the issue of illegal immigrants voting. Moreover, the DOJ requested a description of “the verification process…that election officials perform to verify the required information supplied by the registrant.”
In response to the letter, voting rights lawyer Bryan Sells, who reportedly worked at the DOJ under Obama, criticized the Justice Department’s requests, saying, “I think the question I had after reading these emails is whether what they’re really looking for goes beyond what Congress allowed for.”
On the other hand, Kory Langhoffer, a Republican lawyer who has served as counsel for the Republican National Committee, supported the requests, saying, “I don’t think it’s reasonable to say the sky is falling, because the information requested here is already in the hands of both the state and federal governments.”
Moreover, Langhoffer drove home his point by saying that it was important to know “voters are citizens and residents, and are not voting in more than one jurisdiction,” adding in a statement to Spotlight PA, “If there is a problem in one of those areas, we should fix it — and if there is *not* a problem there, people should know that our system works well.”
Importantly, the letters sent by the DOJ to election officials followed a March 25, 2025, executive order in which President Trump called for the preservation and protection of the “integrity of American elections,” writing, ” The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election.”
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Furthermore, President Trump ordered the implementation of several enforcement measures designed to make elections “honest and worthy of the public trust,” which included the requirement that all voters in U.S. elections present a United States passport and “an identification document compliant with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 (Public Law 109-13, Div. B) that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.”
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