We All Know Why DOJ Is Ignoring PA Dems’ Election Lawbreaking

Attorney General Merrick Garland talks a lot about voting rights. In August, he promised the Justice Department would “use every authority we have to protect the right to vote.” In 2021, he said the department would “rededicate” itself to “enforcing federal law to protect the franchise for all eligible voters.”

This past week, a handful of Pennsylvania counties disenfranchised voters by choosing to count illegal ballots that canceled out legal votes. It’s a massive scandal.

As Democrat Sen. Bob Casey is refusing to concede a losing race to his Republican challenger Dave McCormick, officials in Bucks, Philadelphia, Monroe, Erie, Chester, and Montgomery Counties have flouted the law in an apparent attempt to deliver Casey some extra votes. But the DOJ is nowhere to be seen.

In Bucks County, election officials decided to count more than 400 undated or improperly dated ballots, and 100 ballots that failed to meet signature requirements. In Philadelphia County, officials are accused of counting more than 600 invalid ballots that failed to comply with the date requirement, as well as 663 ballots missing signatures from election officials, 227 ballots missing a reason for casting a provisional ballot, and 50 with insufficient voter affidavits.

In Monroe County, McCormick sued the elections board for 42 ballots that didn’t meet date requirements and 24 provisional ballots lacking voter signatures. Erie County and Chester County face lawsuits for counting 120 ballots and 58 ballots, respectively, that lack election officials’ signatures. In Montgomery County, McCormick is suing the elections board for counting 414 provisional ballots that lack signatures from either the voter or election officials.

In response to The Federalist’s inquiry about whether the DOJ would investigate any of these counties, Press Assistant Julia Hartnett declined to comment.

When voting to count the illegal ballots, Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said, “People violate laws anytime they want. For me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

Well, a court did pay attention. On Monday evening, in response to the legal battle over the undated ballots, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reaffirmed its previous ruling that “mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the requirements of the Pennsylvania Election Code” must not be counted and ordered the counties to comply.

But why did the DOJ — which has shown itself only too willing to get involved in election fights when doing so benefits Democrats — sit this one out? We all know why.

The DOJ was quick to sue the state of Virginia last month for removing noncitizens — for whom it is illegal to vote in federal and Virginia elections — from its voter rolls. In compliance with a law signed 18 years ago by a Democrat governor, Gov. Glenn Youngkin oversaw the removal of more than 6,000 noncitizens from Virginia’s voter rolls from his inauguration in 2022 to July 2024. Garland’s DOJ sued to stop Virginia from continuing, arguing the voter roll maintenance ran afoul of the National Voter Registration Act’s prohibition on certain removals within 90 days of an election.

But, as former Federal Elections Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky has noted, that NVRA provision deals specifically with people whose addresses have changed. The statute says the 90-day provision doesn’t apply to removing people who have become ineligible by dying or being convicted of a felony — so it obviously doesn’t apply to noncitizens, “who were never eligible to register in the first place,” Spakovsky says.

On Oct. 30, in a smackdown of the DOJ’s lawfare, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary order allowing Virginia to keep the noncitizens it had removed off the voter rolls for the 2024 election.

The DOJ brought a similar lawsuit against Alabama in September. It also went to war with Arizona over the state’s laws requiring voters to prove their U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. It went after a small Texas county for not making race a big enough factor in its redistricting for county commissioner precincts.

It went after Donald Trump ally Elon Musk for a giveaway his PAC organized for swing state voters who sign a pledge supporting constitutional liberties. In March, Garland committed to targeting popular state laws that require voter ID, comparing them to Jim Crow laws. And of course, his department has found time to wage not one but two politicized prosecutions of Trump himself, which were clearly designed to hurt the Republican’s electoral chances.

But somehow, the DOJ just doesn’t have the time to check out the lawbreaking going on in Pennsylvania. Maybe they’re too busy packing their bags and hiring lawyers.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.