No. of Recommendations: 1
Administration officials have threatened to send ICE officers to oversee elections and look for undocumented persons. If there are non-citizens voting or attempting to vote (which, from my understanding, there are vanishingly few), the Feds need to bring their evidence to court. If the problem were wide-spread enough (which, again, it almost certainly isn't), the courts could then give the Feds some more direct ability to oversee elections in that problematic area, perhaps a county or two. Or can they actually proactively intervene in an election without a court order?It depends on what you mean by "proactively intervene" in an election. The federal government is allowed to take any and all lawful actions it chooses to take, even when those actions have an effect on elections. To use an obvious example, the federal government used to constantly review state election procedures and tell the states whether they were permissible or not under the Voting Rights Act pre-clearance process. That is clearly "proactively intervening" in an election, but was equally clearly permissible (even the SCOTUS decision in
Shelby didn't say this exceeded federal authority, just that the formulae were outdated to a constitutionally impermissible degree). The feds don't get to run elections, but they get to adopt and enforce
rules on how that election is conducted.
That power extends to monitoring voting places. For example, in the 2022 midterms, the Biden Administration's DOJ sent election monitors to polling places in 24 states to ensure compliance with federal voting rights laws:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-de...Which makes sense - the federal government's power to regulate compliance with voting rights regulations would necessarily include the power to have people present at polling places to ensure those regulations were complied with. Those were federal officials present in numerous polling places, and from the description of their role I would suspect that those agents would be highly visible.
The question whether the feds powers to regulate immigration and conduct immigration enforcement allow it to take actions that would affect an election is obviously much more complicated. The nexus between the power to enforce immigration laws and Election Day is much more tenuous. I agree with you that states that want to make sure that doesn't happen should probably try to get an injunction ahead of time, but I'm not certain they would be successful.
