NEW YORK — The U.S. Department of Justice has requested access to voting equipment used in the 2020 election in two Missouri counties in what appears to be a wide-ranging effort to more closely monitor election processes around the country.
A DOJ official in August contacted the county clerks and asked for access to their Dominion Voting Systems equipment, according to a memo from the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities that was shared Wednesday with The Associated Press.
Jasper County Clerk Charlie Davis declined, saying he no longer had the equipment. The memo said McDonald County Clerk Jessica Cole had the equipment, but also declined. In a statement quoted in the memo, Cole said state and federal law prohibits election officials from giving unauthorized access to election equipment.
The unconventional requests to a state President Donald Trump has won three times, first reported by the Missouri Independent, signal how the DOJ during Trump's second term has sought a closer watch over how states run their elections. The president himself has sought broad authority over elections in the runup to the 2026 midterms that the Constitution does not give him.
Election experts have said the Justice Department is stretching beyond its legal authority with its outreach in Missouri and its separate demands for state voter registration lists in nearly two dozen states.
Colorado-based Dominion has been a frequent target of conspiracy theorists who have championed Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and who have asserted, without evidence, that its equipment manipulated votes. It has fought back against those claims by filing defamation lawsuits that have resulted in massive settlements: The conservative outlet Newsmax recently agreed to pay $67 million and in 2023 Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million after the judge overseeing the case said it was “CRYSTAL clear" that none of the allegations against the company were true.
The DOJ has no authority over voting machines nor does it have the expertise or capacity to review the equipment, David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said during a media briefing Wednesday.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and it was not clear whether the Missouri outreach had anything to do with Trump's call in June for the department to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election. He has refused to accept his loss to Democrat Joe Biden that year, despite losing dozens of court challenges, audits, recounts and reviews that affirmed the results in the battleground states, and his own attorney general saying there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
In Missouri, voting equipment is approved by the secretary of state and meets strict state and federal standards, said Sherry Parks, president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities. Parks said local election officials are responsible for custody, maintenance, preparation, testing and storage of the equipment. They are not allowed to let unauthorized parties access or tamper with the machines.
According to the memo, Missouri's former secretary of state, Republican Jay Ashcroft, contacted the Jasper County clerk last week and asked him to comply with the DOJ's request. Ashcroft suggested the clerk should give DOJ a piece of equipment, and Ashcroft would replace that equipment with a new item, the memo said. The clerk told Ashcroft he couldn't comply because he no longer had the voting equipment.
Ashcroft could not immediately be reached for comment. The memo said Ashcroft's request followed the initial outreach to the two clerks by Mac Warner, the former Republican secretary of state in West Virginia who now works in the Justice Department's civil rights division.
The request to access Dominion voting equipment follows a DOJ effort to get copies of voter registration lists from state election administrators in at least 23 states, the AP has found.
In some states that have declined or demurred on those requests, citing their own state laws or the DOJ's failure to fulfill Privacy Act obligations, the agency has followed up by sending additional letters demanding the voter data on short deadlines.
In Minnesota and California, DOJ officials threatened to sue for the voter lists.
The unusually expansive outreach has raised alarm among some election officials because states have the constitutional authority to run elections and federal law protects the sharing of individual data with the government.
Elsewhere in the country, other parts of the federal government also appear to be seeking more involvement in election processes.
In Colorado, a consultant who said he was calling on behalf of the White House contacted 10 Republican county clerks in July, according to Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association.
The consultant told at least two of the clerks that he wanted people in the federal government to inspect their voting systems, an action that would be a crime in Colorado without proper authorization, according to Crane. A third clerk received a follow-up call from a different person with a similar request, claiming to be calling on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security.
“They were putting clerks in a position to where they could be brought up on charges,” Crane said. “That was very concerning.”
