To justify the redistricting in his state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited a letter from Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, that challenged the legality of four existing congressional districts.
Dhillon said in a statement: “Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections.”
She said the agency “has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”
Trump has been blunt about his partisan goals in Texas, and he has suggested that other GOP-controlled states should pursue their own redistricting efforts – a move that threatens to set off an all-out redistricting war this year with Democrats in California and other Democrat-led states.
The administration’s recent actions have unsettled some election officials, who have endured years of threats and harassment following the 2020 election and the conspiracy theories about election fraud that flourished in its aftermath.
Election officials “are surfing on quicksand,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ voting rights attorney.
“They don’t know what the executive order means, if it has any meaning whatsoever,” he said. “They don’t know if they will be investigated just for having done their jobs. They don’t know if the vast power of the federal government is going to be weaponized against them. They don’t know if the Department of Justice is going to be suing them.”
A recent survey of 858 local election officials by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School bears that out. It found more than half of local election officials – 59% – say they are concerned about political leaders engaging in efforts to interfere with how election officials do their jobs. And 46% said they were concerned about politically motivated investigations of their work or that of their fellow election officials.
The fight over voting machines in Colorado
In early July, as previously reported by The Washington Post and media outlets in Colorado, Republican election clerks began receiving calls and texts from Small. Small, who has worked for Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert and for the US Interior Department during Trump’s first term, now is a principal with a Denver public affairs firm.
County officials interviewed by CNN said Small told them he was reaching out specifically to Republican clerks in blue states in a push to help advance Trump’s executive order.
Grantham, the election clerk in Fremont County, said Small’s outreach to only Republican officials was an early red flag during their conversation. Another concern arose, he said, when Small mentioned gaining access to the county’s election equipment.
“My response was, ‘I didn’t believe that the president had the authority in the Constitution to write executive orders to affect elections and that until the Supreme Court found that he could, I would not let anybody access my voting equipment.”
CNN reached out to Small, and his attorney, Suzanne Taheri, responded to CNN’s inquiry. In a text, Taheri said Small’s outreach “supported efforts by allies in the administration to encourage officials to participate in President Trump’s election security executive order.”
He undertook the activity “on a volunteer basis, during his own free time, while on paternity leave,” she added. Neither Small nor Taheri answered questions about who exactly in the administration asked him to contact the clerks.
The White House distanced itself from Small’s actions in a statement.
“Jeff Small does not speak for the White House nor was he ever authorized to do official business on behalf of the White House,” a White House spokesperson said in an email to CNN.
Miller did not respond to CNN requests for comment.
The impact on local election officials
In Colorado, election officials say, there is heightened sensitivity around who can access election equipment, after the high-profile prosecution of former Mesa County elections clerk, Tina Peters. She became a celebrity among pro-Trump activists who have advanced false claims that voting machines had been rigged to flip votes from Trump to then-candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Many state laws set strict security standards for voting machines to prevent tampering with elections. Colorado has specifically barred third parties from accessing election equipment.
Last year, a judge sentenced Peters to nine years in prison after she was convicted on state charges for her role in a breach of her county’s election system as part of an unsuccessful hunt for fraud.
Trump and his administration have taken up Peters’ cause, however.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department said it was reviewing her case as part of a broad mandate from Trump to counter prosecutions it said were aimed at “inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice.”
And in a social media post in May, the president weighed in personally, calling Peters an “innocent Political Prisoner” and directing the Justice Department to “to take all necessary action to help secure” her release.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told CNN that her office has provided recent voter data to the Justice Department that’s generally available to the public.
But she said she declined to comply with a request related to records from the 2020 election because the federal government has no “legal basis” to seek it. Federal law only requires the preservation of election data in federal races for 22 months.
Griswold, a Democrat, said Trump’s recent actions demonstrate the president “is using the power of the federal government to undermine American elections and undermine voter confidence in them.”
In Colorado, a state Trump lost in all three of his White House bids, tensions over election administration remain high.
Koppes, the Republican clerk of Weld County, said she faced so many threats for her outspoken defense of the 2020 election results – and her county’s use of Dominion Voting machines – that she began to vary her routes to and from work, a practice she continues today.
Crane, the head of the clerk’s association, said it took a “lot of courage” for county clerks to rebuff the recent overtures, given the climate of suspicion and harassment that still persists. He noted that an elections office in southern Colorado housing Dominion machines was firebombed recently. No one was injured in the after-hours incident.
“The threats against election officials are very real,” he added.
