The so-called Department of Justice sent a swarm of "monitors" to various voting sites across America—almost half of U.S. states—to oversee "compliance" with federal voting rights law on Election Day. And yet, we haven't heard a peep out of the DOJ since all hell broke loose in crucial swing counties where its federal foot soldiers were supposedly stationed.
Tasked with "protecting the rights of voters," the horde of hall monitors were dispatched at the behest of President Joe Biden's politicized DOJ to babysit the ballot box in 64 jurisdictions. 2022 marked an intensification of in-person federal supervision compared to the last presidential election cycle when two dozen less jurisdictions were visited by the feds.
Despite numerous admitted irregularities, discrepancies, delays, & outright gaslighting by Maricopa election folks, DOJ—which sent observers—hasn’t said a word. There seems to be a distinct political bias in their concern over blatant disenfranchisement. Cf. GA election lawsuit.
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) November 14, 2022
So, what did the ramped-up DOJ observation efforts actually do? It's a question we won't see an official answer to.
Townhall has contacted the DOJ for the department's response to claims of voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression in key counties that experienced widespread ballot-counting issues while under increased DOJ scrutiny.
DOJ spokeswoman Aryele Bradford, from the public affairs office, refused to comment when Townhall asked if the department's civil rights division will take action to investigate the allegations and questioned what the DOJ observers documented at these affected polling places. "We are declining comment on your inquiry," the DOJ representative replied.
From what we the people did witness, some of the "monitored" and most populous areas were acutely afflicted with Election Day-turned-Election Week difficulties, ranging from improper printer settings to malfunctioning tabulation machines. Anything that could go wrong went—well—wrong, to say the least. There were manmade mishaps and preventable problems that prompted many voters to feel disenfranchised by the mismanaged elections process.
A judge ruled in a court order that voters in Luzerne County, which was on the DOJ's watch list, were "disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote," after a scarcity of the paper that's used to tabulate ballots brought voting to a standstill and caused Pennsylvanians to be "turned away" at the polls, with some never to return. "Hundreds if not thousands" left Tuesday "due to the ineptness of our election bureau," a councilman calculated, per Times Leader.
In the court order extending voting hours the judge writes: “Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote.”
— Dasha Burns (@DashaBurns) November 8, 2022
Local officials are shocked. One says: "I don't know how you could get that wrong." 1/3 https://t.co/wiwgtQjPO4
The mass breakdown of voting equipment—with one job to do—on a single day of the year they're supposed to function has raised eyebrows among skeptical voters who want certainty that their vote counted, literally and figuratively. Election officials want us to write the muck-ups off as just a series of misfortunate, unforeseen events that happened to unfold on a date every American citizen knows far in advance as the Tuesday after the first Monday in the month of November.
A talking head in the nation's second-largest voting jurisdiction, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates, claimed it's the "standard" for vote tallying to take so long and that it's "just how things work in Arizona."
"No one has been disenfranchised," Gates insisted during a press gaggle, following reports of "misread" ballots at a number of Maricopa County precincts and tabulators in one-fifth of voting centers countywide not working right.
This same scene played out tens of thousands of times all across Maricopa County. How many voters were disenfranchised or simply ran out of time? If the majority of ED voters were Democrats, this would be the number 1 news story in America still today. Total joke pic.twitter.com/noY1RRQv0Q
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 14, 2022
Voting hours were not extended in Maricopa County despite a request from GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake's campaign. Arizona Republicans are now citing exit polling data that indicates GOP voters, who tend to vote in-person, were "disproportionately disenfranchised by Maricopa County's incompetence," while Democrats are "more likely to vote by mail" and, thus, were "less likely to be harmed by problems with tabulators and printers that arose on Election Day."
"Voter suppression reared its ugly head in Arizona at the hands of Maricopa County," the Arizona GOP declared.
REMEMBER: 72%+ of the votes on Election Day in person were Republican.
— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) November 12, 2022
When you have 30% of the tabulating machines failing, causing people to leave the lines and give up.
This is voter suppression targeting a political party.
"Obstacles" to submitting a ballot and having a ballot counted as well as "restrictions" and "preventions" from participating in an election, such as voting, are all examples of civil rights violations, as outlined online by the DOJ's civil rights division.
Last month, the DOJ rolled out an overall game plan to "ensure that all qualified voters have the opportunity to cast their ballots and have their votes counted." Now, in the aftermath of the mayhem-filled 2022 midterms, the DOJ doesn't have much, if anything, to say about voting irregularities and swirling claims of malfeasance afoot in the U.S. elections.
This is after months of fear-mongering from the Biden administration that conjured "Jim Crow 2.0" imagery of a voter-suppression boogeyman coming for black voters in Georgia following the state's passage of election integrity legislation.
REPORTER: "President Biden last year likened the new Georgia voting law to 'Jim Crow in the 21st century, but turnout so far...has smashed midterm records."
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 25, 2022
KJP: "High turnout and voter suppression can be happening at the same time." pic.twitter.com/fdJdpynmbs
In reality, Georgia voters set an all-time midterm early turnout record, shattering the 2.5 million mark for ballots cast prior to Election Day and reaching "near Presidential-level numbers," said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Moreover, many of Georgia's early voters were black. "Voter turnout in Georgia reached historic highs on the first day of early voting in this midterm election, and Black Voters comprised 35% of all those who turned out to vote..." celebrated Black Voters Matter. The black male vote totaled more than 46,000 compared to 38,800 voters in 2018.
Compared to the last midterm election in 2018, Georgians far exceeded the early voting numbers for the first two days and came very close to the 2020 results, according to data from the Secretary of State.
— Black Voters Matter Fund (@BlackVotersMtr) October 21, 2022
Townhall also reached out to DOJ civil rights chief Kristen Clarke, who was handpicked by President Joe Biden to be assistant attorney general for the department's civil rights division. Clarke, a prominent NAACP leader in the area of voting rights, led a lawsuit to stop then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp from enforcing election integrity reform.
At the time of publication, Clarke's office did not respond to Townhall's request for comment.
The otherwise vocal DOJ's selective mutism is on par with its refusal to bring far-left abortion extremists to justice for attacking pro-life pregnancy centers following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Clarke was the one who made the announcement in early October that 11 peaceful pro-life leaders are being prosecuted by her division's trial attorneys.