The Trump Plan to Prosecute Election Officials and Suppress the Vote

Mother Jones illustration; Getty

Former President Donald Trump has been very clear about his intentions if he returns to power: He will take revenge on everyone who, he believes, stood in his way during the 2024 election. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.” 

Trump’s threats to prosecute perceived enemies are nothing new. His road to the White House in 2016 was paved with chants of “Lock her up!” But in 2024, Trump now has a blueprint for taking control of the Department of Justice and directing politically-motivated prosecutions—particularly of local election officials.

It’s all there in Project 2025’s agenda. In a little-noticed section of the Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page right-wing policy tome, a close Trump ally has laid out how Trump could do just as his post threatened. This two-page segment explains how the DOJ would go after local election administrators who make decisions Trump and his appointees disagree with.

According to experts, the factual premises of the section are mistaken, outlandish, and contradictory to current law. But the message it sends is crystal clear: if an election administration official makes it easier to vote in a way that the Trump DOJ does not like, it will investigate and possibly prosecute that official for criminal wrongdoing.

In the lead-up to November, lawsuits already abound over voting rules and regulations. What forms of ID are needed to register? Do mail-in ballot envelopes need to have hand-written dates on them? Is a county or state doing enough to keep voter rolls accurate? Such decisions can change the outcome of close elections by either enfranchising or disqualifying thousands of voters. Trump and the Republican Party oppose laws and policies that make it easier to vote, and advocate for additional hurdles that make it harder for people to register and cast a ballot. They do this under the guise of thwarting fraud, but in reality their policies make it harder for Democratic constituencies, including people of color, to vote.

While the GOP and its allies have long taken local officials to court over these debates, Project 2025 imagines a dystopian escalation: that the Department of Justice could mount a raid, an investigation, and even a criminal prosecution if it doesn’t like voting policies put in place by a local official. 

The proposal is tucked into the chapter on overhauling the Department of Justice, authored by Gene Hamilton, a former Trump official in the department who is likely to return in a second administration. In it, Hamilton envisions the criminal section at DOJ investigating “the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance.”

“They want to criminalize election administration and disagreements over election administration,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former Obama Justice Department official, said after reviewing the section.

To allow the federal government to threaten prosecutions over the minutiae of local election administration, Project 2025 perversely cites 1871’s Ku Klux Klan Act, a law passed in the wake of the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved citizens—including their right to vote. Today, one of the law’s uses is to protect the right to vote from race-based discrimination. Notably, Trump himself faces charges under the statute for his attempt to nullify millions of votes and overturn the results of the 2020 election.

According to Project 2025, a second Trump administration would take this law that was meant to go after conspiracies that deprive people of rights and weaponize it in furtherance of the administration’s own plots to deprive people of their right to vote. “They’re asking for a world in which every disagreement about what is legally authorized is investigated for criminal prosecution under the Klan Act,” says Levitt. “That is, charitably, nuts.”

The one example Hamilton provides of an election administration decision that would warrant such a prosecution is chilling. In 2020, Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s elections chief, authorized counties to give provisional ballots to voters whose mail ballots had been disqualified for minor issues.

“We want eligible voters to be able to cast one ballot,” Boockvar says, explaining the decision. “If the first ballot that they tried to cast can’t be cast because they had the wrong date, then that gets tossed. And then they can vote by provisional ballot. There’s no violation of any laws. This is just another way to protect that an American citizen who’s eligible to vote can cast their ballot.”

Indeed, Boockvar’s move helped eligible voters vote. No one was hurt, no one’s rights were taken away, and no fraudulent votes were cast. There was certainly no conspiracy to deprive anyone of their rights. And yet, this is the scenario that Project 2025 calls out, not only as illegal, but as criminal. “That they’ve chosen this example shows not just ‘We’re coming after you for crimes’,” says Levitt, but “’We’re coming after you for things that are not crimes.'”

In fact, in just the past few days, two courts in Pennsylvania came to the conclusion that voters should have access to provisional ballots in such situations. If upheld, the decisions will likely help Democrats in the critical swing state, where the party’s voters are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

If the political motivation for a criminal probe such as the one that Hamilton suggests is clear, the legal one is pure fiction. “This is beyond the pale for any prosecutor,” says Levitt. “It’s difficult to convey how extreme this particular example that they’ve chosen is. And that’s the scariest part of the vibe. This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials,” adds Boockvar.

The proposal to investigate and prosecute election officials over administrative disputes—and to do it, no less, under a law meant to protect people’s rights—is almost ludicrous. And yet, with the right personnel under the direction of a Trump White House, such legal action is not inconceivable. 

In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, recently authorized raids on the homes of Democrats and civil rights advocates in the Latino community. He has also used the power of his office to sue Democratic counties working to make it easier to vote. Last week, he sued Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, for sending registration forms to residents. A few days later, Paxton sued Travis County, where Austin is located, for hiring a contractor to encourage people to register to vote. This wasn’t a nefarious crime but, as one county commissioner put it, a “nice thing to do.” Paxton’s moves come on the heels of legislation passed last year that allows the Texas secretary of state to take over local election administration in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest Democratic stronghold. Trump has floated Paxton as a contender for attorney general if he wins in November.

“Look at what’s happening on the ground in terms of civic activists being harassed in Texas, or voter rolls being purged in loosey-goosey ways,” warns Alex Ault, policy counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

To Ault, its all “part of a trend to make voting more confusing, make people afraid to be active in promoting and defending their right to vote, and trying to have a chilling effect.”

Project 2025 lays out an authoritarian plan to wield the law in order to intimidate election officials and stop people from voting. That is surely not lost on Hamilton, who may get a chance to help implement the proposal if Trump returns to power—nor on the former president calling for prosecutions of anyone who stands in his way.