project 2025: voting rights & elections

Since the failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, election officials and workers across the country have been the targets of unprecedented attacks simply for doing their jobs. 

Project 2025 promises to make voting even more difficult and elections less secure, allowing foreign and domestic interference to taint the vote.

Think it can’t happen? After all, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act to make challenges to the presidential elections at the congressional level more difficult. But at the state level, undermining the vote is already happening.

  • Since 2020, a dozen states have enacted new criminal laws with harsh penalties targeting everything from minor mistakes to legitimate efforts to help voters exercise their constitutional rights.
  • Several states — including Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas — have recently enacted laws to expand the scope of observer access (poll watchers) while limiting the circumstances under which election workers may constrain or remove disruptive observers.
  • Several states have enacted laws to make it more difficult for citizens to register to vote—and to vote, including right here in Indiana. Indiana now requires proof of residency, citizenship, and more id information for mail-in ballots. It requires cross-referencing voter info with various entities—a process that could lead to the unwarranted disqualification of many, many voters.
  • In Georgia, any registered voter can file an unlimited number of voter challenges with their local elections board alleging that people on the voter rolls are not eligible to vote. Activists have filed around half a million challenges going back to the January 2021 Senate runoffs in the state.

So far, the worst has not come to pass.

  • In 2022, prominent election deniers who ran for statewide offices in swing states all lost, usually running behind other statewide candidates from the same party.
  • Most local election officials who left were replaced by people equally dedicated to upholding democratic values, and even some who didn’t trust the system changed their views once in office.
  • And in Georgia county election boards have consistently rejected challenges to voter eligibility over the last few years.

Still, these thousands of challenges have often overwhelmed election workers—and created fear among eligible voters. Disinformation is spread when people use challenges as ‘proof’ of voter fraud. Election denialism poses an ongoing and evolving threat.

In addition, there continue to be real threats to the integrity of our elections, especially cyber threats from at home and abroad—and lies about voting and election security.

The federal government has provided tools to the states that have been helping to combat the lies and threats to our elections.

  • The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) CISA) is part of the Department of Homeland Security. That agency provides the IT support that most election offices need to successfully face growing cyber threats to election infrastructure.
  • CISA helps state and local election offices detect and respond to security breaches. This assistance is particularly necessary close to an election. Most election offices don’t have the personnel or expertise to discover and respond to such breeches.
  • The FBI and Secret Service also play a role in detecting security breaches, but that role is not to respond to them but to build a case against the bad actors who precipitated them.
  • CISA has helped local election offices improve their physical security.
  • CISA also helps combat lies about elections and voting with its Election Security Rumor v. Reality webpage and has forwarded third-party reports of election falsehoods to social media platforms. 
  • The FBI also plays an important role in combatting disinformation about elections, countering efforts by countries such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran to manipulate our elections and intimidate voters.

Enter Project 2025

  • Project 2025 would gut CISA, removing most of the help it provides for security and barring it from countering election related conspiracies.
    • Social media platforms, where most people turn for news, would no longer have access to factual information from the federal government. They would, in fact, would be barred from flagging falsehoods under the guise of ‘free speech’.
    • Election lies would be especially prevalent among minority language groups who have fewer news sources available to them.
    • More physical threats to election workers would result.
  • Project 2025 would prohibit the FBI from conducting any “activities related to combatting the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans” outside of criminal investigations.
    • The FBI could no longer assess the extent to which content that originated in another country is shared or adopted by American voters.
    • This assessment is critical in the FBI’s investigations into foreign influence of U.S. elections.
    • Threats to election integrity, especially from foreign actors, would increase and be more successful.
  • Project 2025 would tie federal grants to conditions such as sharing sensitive private information from voter registration databases. State and local entities would be less likely to cooperate with the very federal agencies that had helped them.
  • Project 2025 advocates for targeting tech companies, government officials, academic researchers, and civil society with retaliation for trying to address election misinformation. Social media platforms would be punished for limiting election lies on their platforms.
  • The federal government would be weaponized to retaliate against election officials for decisions federal officials don’t like. Violations of law would be moved from the Civil Rights Division to the Justice Department.
    • For example, Project 2025 explicitly recommends that the Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth should be prosecuted for issuing guidance protecting access to mail voting during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. It maintains that he violated a 19th century federal civil rights law—one meant to protect voting rights!
    • According to Project 2025 the president can interfere with the Justice Department around investigations and prosecutions, ending the long-standing practice of a president refraining from such involvement.
      • Trump has already threatened to prosecute Mark Zuckerberg for donating more than $400 million to help with election administration in 2020 when needed funds were short.
      • He has also threatened to prosecute Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.
      • Kash Patel, a former and current Trump official has said Trump will go after anyone who “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
  • Under Project 2025 campaign finance laws would be largely ignored.
  • Project 2025 would lift limits on campaign donations while reducing door transparency.

Project 2025 could criminalize the voting process, intimidating election officials, conducting sham investigations, even prosecuting election officials and voters.  Election officials could be bullied into compliance with the wishes and direction of a Trump administration, in some cases nullifying votes in favor of republican candidates. (Public Citizen)

Brennan Center for Justice: https://www.brennancenter.org/series/project-2025

Public Citizen: https://www.citizen.org/article/project-2025s-pro-corruption-anti-democracy-agenda/

Project 2025 Mandate: https://tinyurl.com/ya37cfnw, pages 550, 553, 564, 562, 863, 866

Leadership on Human and Civil Rights: https://civilrights.org/project2025-guides/ What’s at Stake for Civil Rights

Project 2025: The Voting Rights Act. The Fulcrum.: https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/project-2025-voting-rights