When David Becker applied for his dream job as a lawyer at the Department of Justice’s Voting Section, he never thought he would actually get it—not because he was a bad lawyer, but because it was among the most sought-after jobs in the country.
“It was one of the most in-demand jobs,” Becker, now the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, tells WIRED. “I knew there were going to be thousands of people applying.”
The Voting Section, which is part of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, was established following the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. For the next six decades, the lawyers who worked there focused on ensuring that every American had an equal right to vote. This meant enforcing the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, representing the United States in court to prevent discriminatory voting practices. While many of the cases were high-profile, a lot of the work the lawyers did affected a tiny fraction of the population, work that no one else was willing or capable of doing.
Against his expectations, Becker got the job, and it was everything he had hoped it would be. He worked there for seven years, from 1998 to 2005. “I felt incredibly privileged, and I was working with some of the best lawyers I had ever seen in my life,” he says.
But, as I document in my latest piece for WIRED, over the course of the past year, the Trump administration has ripped apart the Voting Section, a place described by one expert as “the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Division.” The administration has removed decades of institutional knowledge by effectively forcing out more than two dozen experienced lawyers and replacing them with a cadre of loyalists who appear to be carrying out the White House’s plans to subvert trust in elections.
Becker, like a dozen other former Voting Section lawyers and experts I spoke to over the course of the last three months, is not only deeply sad about what has happened, but angry that the work done on behalf of the most vulnerable people in US society is no longer being carried out.
One former DOJ lawyer who had many years of experience in the Voting Section before being pushed out last year, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, recalled a case they worked on in a small town in a southern US state where Black voters were subject to discrimination.
“The black section of town had horrible roads,” they told WIRED. “They’d never had representation because they had citywide elections, and [the city had] never elected a person of color. Now [after the DOJ’s work] there’s a person of color in the city government. I just don’t know if that type of work will ever come back, and it’s deeply depressing.”
Over the past 12 months, lawyers within the Voting Section have been suing states to access their unredacted voter rolls, as part of what critics fear is the administration’s broader push to prevent large swathes of the population from voting. So far, the courts have pushed back, but Trump and his allies appear intent on pushing these policies through no matter what. And with the November midterm elections coming up, former DOJ lawyers are deeply concerned.
Read more about the dismantling of this once-storied corner of the US government, and let me know what you think in the comments.
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