Donald Trump’s Department of Justice spent weeks emailing its request for Oklahoma’s voter rolls to the wrong email address. Then it sued Oklahoma for not complying.
It began in December, when Department of Justice officials wrote a letter demanding that Oklahoma Secretary of State Paul Ziriax turn over the state’s voter registration lists, Democracy Docket reported Thursday.
There was already a problem: Paul Ziriax isn’t Oklahoma’s secretary of state, and never has been. He is actually the secretary of Oklahoma’s State Election Board. And somehow, that isn’t even the DOJ’s biggest blunder in this tale.
The agency didn’t hear back, so it sent another email, and then another. Nothing.
In late January, DOJ officials finally got a response from Oklahoma election official Misha Mohr, who said that her office had only just received the previous emails.
“The email address was misspelled on the previous correspondence,” she wrote. Instead of sending messages to “info” at the Oklahoma State Election’s office, the government had addressed their demands to “ifo” at the same mail server.
This gaffe is part of a wider trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps by Trump’s Department of Justice, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases. A recent filing included misspelled versions of “voters,” “emergency,” and “United States.” Another filing repeatedly misspelled the name of an elected official.
The federal government has sued Washington, D.C., and 29 states—including Oklahoma—for not complying with its demands to turn over voter registration forms. Twelve states have provided or pledged to provide the government voter registration lists, with information including license plates and Social Security numbers. Federal judges in California, Michigan, and Oregon have rejected the federal government’s claim to the troves of voters’ personal data.
Improper disclosure of this highly sensitive information could violate state and federal laws, and raises concerns about risks to Americans’ security and privacy. And clearly, the Trump administration has been less than careful with Americans’ Social Security information.
