Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon told Newsmax that Americans have some valid concerns about mail-in voting.
Dhillon told "Carl Higbie Frontline" on Tuesday that the attention needs to be placed on the states. "And what they need to understand," she said, "is that under our election laws currently, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, it is the states that make those laws."
She said mail-in voting is not something that the federal government can arbitrarily change or outlaw.
"And so I know it would be convenient for everyone to hope that President [Donald] Trump, who's a great president, and the Attorney General Pam Bondi would be able to snap their fingers and change things nationally, but that's literally what the Democrats tried to do when Nancy Pelosi was trying to pass H.R. 1 in the last administration. And we don't really want that. We have a system of federalism," Dhillon explained.
Dhillon said the critical actions must be developed at the state level. People concerned about mail-in voting, she said, need to focus on their own state.
"So it really relies on people to vote at the state level and get better laws at that local level for now," Dhillon said.
At the federal level, Dhillon said some related proposals are slow to move. "There are some things that Congress could do regarding federal funding and having better standards, but they haven't done that," she said. "I've gone and testified in Congress, and maybe one day they will do those things."
"But for now," Dhillon said, "what we can do at the Department of Justice is, we have jurisdiction over several federal civil rights laws involving voting, and we are vigorously enforcing those, including in this last election over the objections of a couple of blue states, but we did send election monitors where they were requested, and I could have sent more if more people had requested them."
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Nov. 10 to hear Mississippi's defense of a state law challenged by Republicans that allows a five-day grace period for mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted, a case that could lead to stricter voting rules around the country.
The justices took up Mississippi's appeal of a lower court's ruling that deemed illegal the state law that permits mail-in ballots sent by certain voters to be counted if they were postmarked on or before Election Day but received up to five business days after a federal election.
The court is expected to hear arguments and issue a ruling by the end of June.
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