Project 2025 wants to prosecute swing state election chief over 2020 vote

Project 2025, the conservative agenda designed for a possible second Trump administration, calls for the Justice Department to “investigate and prosecute” the top election official in Pennsylvania over the 2020 election as part of a dramatic overhaul of federal law enforcement.

It’s an unprecedented threat to a specific statewide officeholder — Pennsylvania’s Democratic election chief — in a crucial swing state where Donald Trump and his allies aggressively tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, and a state Trump needs to win in November to regain the presidency.

While policy blueprint doesn't specifically name its proposed Pennsylvania target, only one person held the elected position of secretary of the commonwealth in 2020: Kathy Boockvar.

Boockvar told USA TODAY her department "absolutely" did nothing wrong, and accused the authors of Project 2025 of “taking that disinformation and conspiracy theories and elevating it to a point where it’s being used to try to dismantle our institutions of the United States of America.”

More: What is Project 2025? Inside the conservative plan Trump claims to have 'no idea' about.

Trump has tried to separate himself from Project 2025 amid a heavy backlash against many of its more radical policy prescriptions involving expanding executive power, ending civil service protections for federal workers, and fighting what the document calls "woke culture warriors." Most of the project's authors served in the Trump administration or are otherwise tied to Trump.

Among its hard right recommendations, the plan would curtail federal civil rights enforcement and redirect the Justice Department to investigate alleged fraud in state-level voter registrations.

The document says those changes would make it easier for the federal government to prosecute Pennsylvania's top election official for the guidance that office gave counties in 2020 over ways voters could cast ballots after an elections office rejected their mail-in ballot.

"It is well past time to stop arguing over the audited, verified results of the 2020 election," Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania's current elections chief, said in a statement.

More: Some Project 2025 contributors have trail of racist writings, activity

A proposed agenda for Trump

The Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025, did not respond to a request for comment. The group’s president, Kevin Roberts, wrote in the beginning of the 900-page book that its policies are “the best effort of the conservative movement” and “the next conservative president’s last opportunity to save our republic.”

The foundation is a leading conservative think tank that has influenced the administrations of multiple Republican presidents, dating back at least to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In 2018, the organization touted Trump’s embrace of the group’s previous “Mandate for Leadership,” the same phrase used in the title of Project 2025.

At least 31 of the project's 38 authors and editors are tied to Trump or his first administration. They include former White House assistant special counsel Steven Groves, who is listed as an editor, and Gene Hamilton, a former Trump Justice Department official.

Democrats have savaged Trump over the effort, and the former president has tried to distance himself from it, prompting the project’s director to step down in July.

Danielle Alvarez, senior advisor to Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that Democrats are “lying and fear-mongering” when they allege that these are Trump-endorsed policies. "President Trump's 20 promises to the forgotten men and women and RNC Platform are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term,” Alvarez said.

More: Biden slams Trump after he tries to distance himself from Project 2025

'Radical culture change' proposed at DOJ

Justice Department employees have historically prided themselves on staying free of political interference, but Project 2025 calls on the next White House to break with tradition and intervene directly, including by removing civil service protections from longtime nonpartisan prosecutors.

Project 2025 calls DOJ “a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda," and goes further to say the Civil Rights Division , which focuses on discrimination-related issues, should be "reorganized" and have some of its duties "reassigned" to the Criminal Division .

"It’s signaling that there would be a de-emphasis on enforcing the anti-discrimination components of (the law) because you’re taking away the cases away from the people whose focus is on anti-discrimination," said Jon Greenbaum, who was a Justice Department voting rights lawyer in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked for the department during Barack Obama’s presidency, called it “a radical culture change, and one in which DOJ is truly weaponized."

Prosecuting voter registration fraud

Project 2025 says DOJ has been unwilling to go after voter registration fraud because it was “too politically costly.” Experts described potential scenarios in which Trump loyalists would be pressured to open criminal investigations or prosecutions of his political enemies.

In December 2020, in the waning days of his presidency, Trump tried to install loyalists atop the department who planned to send a letter to Georgia officials saying it was investigating "various irregularities" in the election.

Critics warned to expect more federal interventions in a second Trump administration. “You can see a scenario where the Department of Justice is weaponized to go after baseless voter fraud,” Greenbaum said.

He also pointed to Trump's efforts to replace then-Attorney General Bill Barr at the height of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. "At the end of the Trump administration, President Trump tried to do that with the Department of Justice, and there was resistance to it," he said.

Even without Justice Department interference, Trump and his allies' baseless allegations of fraud have been blamed for political violence, including threats against election workers and Democratic electors .

“The hallmark of autocratic regimes is the use of the Department of Justice or their equivalent, the use of the criminal justice system, to prosecute enemies,” Levitt said.

Conservative storm over provisional ballots

Project 2025 says the DOJ should have looked into “the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance,” pointing to guidance Pennsylvania gave local election officals on how to use provisional ballots.

Provisional ballots are designed to allow people to vote in the event a poll worker can’t immediately determine if they are registered. Since federal law started requiring states to offer provisional ballots more than 20 years ago, elections offices started using them to help people vote who have other issues at the polls, including a lack of sufficient identification .

Pennsylvania's 2020 guidance described several sets of circumstances that elections offices could use to provide someone with a provisional ballot, including if the voter "did not successfully vote an absentee or mail-in ballot" or their ballot "was rejected by the county board of elections and the voter believes they are eligible to vote." (Election officials then confirm whether the person was eligible to vote − whether that ballot should be counted.)

Project 2025 alleged that this guidance was illegal, accusing the Pennsylvancia election chief of trying to "circumvent state law," and concluded that moving prosecuting authority to DOJ's Criminal Division was the only way for "the rule of law to be appropriately enforced."

Levitt, from Loyola Marymount, said he was “quite taken aback” by the proposal. The law that Project 2025 proposes using is rooted in prosecution of extremists like the Ku Klux Klan for using violence and intimidation against Black voters.

Boockvar, the former election chief, emphasized that her office's guidance to county boards was both legal − and optional.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement: “The plans outlined in Project 2025 are a clear attempt to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Project 2025 wants to prosecute swing state election chief over 2020 vote