How Project 2025 Would Endanger Our Elections

While we don't know how much of Project 2025 President-elect Trump will implement when he takes office, we do know that he has deep ties to the people who wrote it-and we know that its proposals around elections and voting could dramatically undermine participation in the democratic process. In preparation for his upcoming administration, I'll walk you through how Project 2025 would make our elections less free, fair, and secure.

Criminalize voting

Within the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Division is responsible for enforcing the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act which, together, protect the right to vote. Project 2025 will transfer the responsibility for investigating and prosecuting election crimes to the Department of Justice's Criminal Division. This shift will significantly "jeopardize the United States' multi-racial democracy" by changing the focus from interference with voting rights to criminalizing the act of voting itself, which may lead to both unwarranted prosecutions and lower turnout. Transferring election-related offenses out of the Civil Rights Division will also lead to the involvement of lawyers in election-related cases who aren't experts in civil rights laws or voting rights.

Project 2025 and its authors aren't concerned with the rights of individual voters-instead, the plan is based on the idea that voter fraud is a bigger issue. However, science has shown over and over and over again that voting fraud is exceedingly rare and not a systematic problem.

Interfere with election administration

In recent elections, election officials and workers already faced harassment and threats because of conspiracy theories and election denialism. Unfortunately, Project 2025 seeks to target those responsible for administering our elections. The document even names Pennsylvania's former Secretary of State, Kathy Boockvar (a member of our Election Science Taskforce), as one of the election officials who should be investigated and prosecuted by the DOJ's Criminal Division for her role in the 2020 election. Project 2025 falsely claims that her direction that voters should be able to vote via provisional ballots if their absentee ballots were rejected violated federal law. This baseless claim weakens trust in elections and opens the door for politicians to levy other malicious legal attacks on election officials and workers.

Project 2025 will also require state and local governments that receive money from the Department of Homeland Security to allow the federal government to access their Department of Motor Vehicles and voter registration databases. This data could be manipulated to spread doubt about election integrity and encourage mass purges of voter rolls.

Decrease election security

In a time when election offices are already struggling to obtain funding and resources they desperately need, Project 2025 proposes substantive cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) which has provided essential cyber and physical security support to election offices across the country to make sure our elections are secure. Ironically, CISA was founded by President Trump in 2018. However, after the 2020 election, Trump fired the agency's director, Christopher Krebs, after Krebs said the 2020 was secure and refused to back Trump's claims of a stolen election.

Project 2025 will also eliminate the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to counter election disinformation, which is at the center of rising threats against election workers. Project 2025 argues that CISA's and the FBI's work to quell disinformation-which includes flagging potentially false information on social media about elections and investigating the role of foreign influence on elections, respectively-violates the First Amendment.

Weaken the fight against election mis- and disinformation

Election mis- and disinformation can mostly be found on social media platforms. Project 2025 proposes that Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) use anti-discrimination policies to penalize social media companies that restrict or limit content related to "core political viewpoints," likely protecting election mis- and disinformation as well as unfounded conspiracy theories. Additionally, Project 2025 opens the door for civil suits against social media platforms that remove user-generated election disinformation from their platforms. President-elect Trump has suggested he would appoint Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr to lead the FCC-and Carr has already started to threaten tech companies and media outlets.

Influence the Census and political representation

Population size, established by the census every ten years, is used to determine how the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representative are distributed across states. The Census Bureau has a long-established reputation for conducting nonpartisan and independent science that "is the bedrock of voting rights enforcement." The proposals of Project 2025 would change this.

Project 2025 will combine the Census Bureau with the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics and fill this new hybrid agency with political appointees after getting rid of civil servants with scientific expertise. By consolidating these agencies, data collection and control of that data is centralized, making it easier for these political appointees to influence data used to inform economic, labor, and voting policy. For example, voter registration, demographic, and citizen voting age population data that are essential to redistricting and voting rights could be distorted for political gain.

Moreover, politicizing the Census Bureau, and by extension the census itself, will likely exacerbate already-common undercounting of racial minority groups and overcounting of White Americans, leading to more extreme racial disparities in political representation and further harm to historically marginalized communities.

The first time around, Trump administration tried to manipulate the Census and alter its processes for political ends over the objection of the agency's experts. They're likely to try again.

Onward together

It won't stop with elections, of course. As my colleagues have noted, Project 2025 will attack science and scientists across the executive branch, breakdown the government's system of checks and balances, dismantle our response to the climate crisis, reshape the judicial branch, damage public health and environmental protection policies, and so much more.

In the face of these threats, UCS will continue protect science in policymaking and remain vigilant against attacks on scientific integrity. We'll also work with state and local officials to implement science-based best practices that protect the right to vote. Everything else we fight for depends on free and fair elections, and we're committed to defending them.

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