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Federal prosecutors issued draconian summonses demanding that millions of North Carolina voters be turned over to immigration authorities by September 25.
Two months into the mid-term, the subpoenas threatened to wreak havoc on the state's electoral machinery, while repeatedly reiterating the Trump administration's discredited claims that illegal immigrants would vote widely.
Unsealed grand jury summons have been sent to the state election board and 44 election commissions in the counties of eastern North Carolina. Their existence became widely known after Marc E. Elias, a lawyer specializing in voting rights, joined the Democratic Party, mentioned them on Twitter.
Although the nature, scope, and impetus of the federal inquiry that gave rise to the testimonies remains mysterious, this measure seemed to be part of an effort to detect and repress unauthorized voting by non-citizens. .
Representatives of the ICE and Ministry of Justice officials involved refused to comment on the issue.
The subpoenas were issued Friday, a week after the federal authorities announced that 19 non-citizens in North Carolina had been accused of throwing illegal votes in the 2016 elections. These indictments stem from an investigation by a newly created federal task force focusing on document and benefit fraud. in the eastern district of North Carolina, where are the 44 counties.
Critics say the arrests are hardly a wave of electoral fraud worthy of such a large demand for documents, which they say could overwhelm the budgets and staff of small counties just as they have to prepare for elections. November. And they raised concerns about privacy. Prosecutors' requests include millions of secret ballots cast by absent voters and early voters whose identities could easily be traced.
Some critics also speculated that the Trump administration was looking to continue the work of its electoral fraud commission, decried in January in a blizzard of complaints and litigation after finding no evidence of significant fraud or corrupt voting system.
This was the latest in a series of controversies surrounding the issue of electoral fraud and whether Republican efforts to combat it masked an effort to suppress voter turnout.
North Carolina has been more controversial than most states. In 2016, a federal court of appeal overturned a law on the identification of state voters drafted by Republicans of North Carolina, claiming that it was aimed at African-American voters almost surgical precision. On election day this year, voters will consider a Republican-backed constitutional amendment that would require voters to present a photo ID at the polls.
The state elections council audited the 2016 elections and reported in April 2017 that it had found 41 suspected cases of non-citizens voting.
President Trump nonetheless described the US voting system as "rigged" and frequently claimed that millions of people, including many undocumented immigrants, had voted illegally.
When the Trump administration's election fraud commission imploded in January, the commission's vice president – Kris Kobach, Kansas's state secretary – said his job would be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security; ICE is part of this department.
Bryan D. Cox, a spokesman for the ICE, said Wednesday that the US District Attorney's Office, Robert J. Higdon Jr.
According to Vanita Gupta, who headed the Civil Rights Division under the presidency of President Obama, US prosecutors have regularly sought the approval of senior officials of the Department of Justice before undertaking investigations that would attract national attention or to provoke controversy. "Given its atypical nature, it is hard to imagine that the main justice was unaware of" investigations and subpoenas, she added.
An official from the Justice Department in Washington referred questions to Mr. Higdon's office, who declined to comment.
Allison Riggs, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, wondered if the subpoenas were part of the next chapter that Mr. Kobach promised for electoral fraud.
"It's clearly a fishing expedition that picks up where the Pence-Kobach Commission stopped," said Ms. Riggs, referring to Vice President Mike Pence, who was president. of the commission. Ms. Riggs added that the administration "appears to be outsourcing the discredited program of the Commission" to federal prosecutors.
"None of this is normal," said Gupta, currently chair of the Conference on Leadership in Human and Civil Rights. "It asks for information that has nothing to do with identifying immigrant violations."
In quotations from some advocates, the subpoenas recalled a lengthy campaign by the Justice Department under President George W. Bush to find and prosecute cases of electoral fraud. United States lawyers, who refused or did not spend time on relatively small electoral fraud cases, were fired under political pressure. At the end, the campaign only got 86 convictions, including some suspicious ones, on more than 200 million ballots.
"The Trump administration has made the idea of election fraud an important rallying point," said Myrna Perez, deputy director of democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. "These are common refrains of political actors who find this beneficial."
She and others have noted that launching a radical survey on election fraud so close to a crucial election could depress the participation not only of naturalized immigrants who can legally vote, but also of Other groups likely to be suspicious of the government.
Many of the 19 people accused last month were non-white, said Ms. Perez, and a number of them said in interviews that they did not know that they were not safe. They were not allowed to vote. Many of the 44 counties that have received subpoenas have disproportionate and black populations.
The summons to appear before the state's elections council requires documents from 2010 to August 2018, including voter registration applications, advance voting application forms and postal voting request forms.
Joshua Lawson, General Counsel for the State Elections and Ethics Council of North Carolina, estimated that he covered more than 15 million state documents.
The summons to appear on county councils requires "all electoral registers, electronic voting books, voting records and / or elector authorization documents and official ballots executed" for a period of five years beginning on August 30, 2013.
Mr. Lawson said it would cover more than five million county documents.
The subpoena application, he said, was "probably the largest in North Carolina in our agency." Like others, he said he was intrigued by the objectives of the investigation.
"With the scope so wide, what is the special interest of the immigration authorities?"
The state election council plans to review the summonses at a telephone meeting on Friday and may question whether to resist them.
Mr. Lawson testified that he wrote to the county councils advising them to contact Mr. Higdon's office directly if they wished to request an extension of the September 25 deadline. Sebastian Kielmanovich, a US deputy attorney, told Lawson in an email that such requests would be taken into account "at the execution of a document to be given pledging to preserve / not destroy information requested ".
Mr. Lawson told Mr. Kielmanovich that his office was "deeply concerned about the administrative leak", the counties would suffer from non-compliance with the subpoenas. In an interview, Lawson said counties should scan millions of paper ballots.
In rural Nash County, John Kearney, director of the local election office, said reporting past elections would be overwhelming for all three council employees. "We will have to expand and hire a contractor with high-speed copiers to do it," he said. "We do not have the manpower or the time in this small office."
The request for a subpoena concerning actual elections had been of particular concern. In North Carolina, votes cast on polling day are anonymous and untraceable, but ballots and advance votes – a significant proportion of the total – are marked by numbers that can be attributed to the people who cast them.
Some election officials said they were worried about giving traceable ballots to federal prosecutors and were convinced that voters in their ridings would be too.
"I thought it was a hoax when I got it," said Kellie Hopkins, director of the Beaufort County Electoral Commission. "A summons for the ballots? I think they'll understand that you do not give ballots.
Hopkins said her office could produce computerized records showing which registered voters voted in a multi-year election. But she said the county's board of directors would meet this week to determine whether to hand in the actual ballots.
She and Kearney said they feared the subpoenas would undermine voters' already weak confidence in election security, and that it may also depress participation in November.
"Most voters expect privacy when they show up to the electoral council to vote," Kearney said. "When this information is released, voters will be upset that their ballots and the names associated with them will be given to a federal prosecutor."
Confidentiality issues also weighed on Trump's commission. A number of states refused to provide the panel with the information requested because it contained personal data on voters.
Ms. Riggs stated that, under normal circumstances, the North Carolina law prohibits the publication of information about private voters such as birth dates or the last four digits of social security numbers, which appear on documents such as than registration requests.
But she said she did not know how state law would apply in the face of a federal subpoena.
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