Project 2025 and voting rights: Fact-checking Kamala Harris’ ad aimed at Black Americans

Amy Sherman
·8 min read
2

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, warned in an ad that Project 2025, a conservative guidebook of presidential policy recommendations, would harm Black Americans, including at the voting booth.

"Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda will give him unchecked political power with no guardrails," said the TV ad that began airing in early September, targeting Black Americans in battleground states. "And it would take Black America backwards. Project 2025 would strip away our voting rights protections."

The ad included no citations or explanations about its voter protections claims. When we asked the Harris campaign for evidence, it pointed to specific pages in Project 2025 about the Justice Department, voter fraud and the U.S. Census Bureau. (Project 2025 is not a Trump campaign document.)

Project 2025 calls for more aggressive voter fraud enforcement; whether these changes would limit Black Americans’ voting rights is a speculative stretch. The project document provides few details about its voting rights recommendations, making it hard to find expert consensus on the consequences for voting access.

This ad differs from others that broadly attack Project 2025 because it speaks directly to Black voters, said Andra Gillespie, an Emory University professor and expert on African American politics. Harris is using the ad to mobilize Black voters who, polls show, have shown more interest in the presidential contest since Harris replaced President Joe Biden atop the ticket.

Voter turnout among Black Americans, typically a left-leaning voting bloc, could play an important role in the election’s outcome. Harris has campaigned in battleground states with a significant number of Black voters, including Georgia and Michigan.

Amid criticism of Project 2025, former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from the document, which the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote with conservative groups’ contributions. But Trump has strong ties to the foundation. In 2022, when Trump gave a keynote speech at a Heritage event in Florida, he said the organization would "lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming."

A CNN review found that at least 140 people who worked for the Trump administration were involved in Project 2025.

Vice President Kamala Harris says in an ad that Project 2025, a set of conservative GOP policy recommendations, would harm Black Americans' voting rights.
Vice President Kamala Harris says in an ad that Project 2025, a set of conservative GOP policy recommendations, would harm Black Americans' voting rights.

Project 2025 proposals

The Harris campaign cited three parts of Project 2025 as evidence for its claim about stripping away Black Americans’ voting rights: reorganizing the Justice Department, investigating state election officials and adding a U.S. Census citizenship question.

Trey Grayson, a Republican and former Kentucky secretary of state, said it "seems like a stretch to say that those three proposals strip protection of rights away from Black Americans." (Grayson has called out election falsehoods some Republicans have promoted.)

Reorganize the Justice Department: The Project 2025 document says the U.S. attorney general should move prosecutions of violations of one part of U.S. law from the civil rights division to the criminal division.

Experts disagreed about the proposed change’s impact. When any presidential administration changes party control, it is normal for the Justice Department to change direction, Grayson said. But protections still exist.

Jonathan Diaz, voting advocacy director at the Campaign Legal Center, an organization supporting expanding voting rights, said that proposed shift "reflects an emphasis on restricting voting access through aggressively criminalizing voting behavior," rather than balancing the enforcement of laws about election crimes with laws that protect voting rights.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said: "Harris may believe that shifting enforcement on certain election violations from DOJ’s civil rights division to its criminal division will result in enforcement decisions overall less favorable to minority interests. It’s fine to argue one way or the other about the merits of such a reorganization.

"But neither choice would strip away anyone’s voting rights." (Olson has called Trump’s claims about noncitizen voting and liberals’ claims about voter suppression "bogus.")

Hans von Spakovsky, who leads the Heritage Foundation’s elections law initiative and is a former Justice Department official under former President George W. Bush, said that even under Project 2025, the Justice Department’s civil division would continue enforcing federal laws such as the Voting Rights Act. But the criminal division would handle cases involving criminal statutes. Von Spakovsky has spent decades alleging rampant voter fraud, despite evidence by courts, academics and journalists that U.S. elections are secure.

Investigate state election guidance: Project 2025 calls on the Justice Department to investigate voting guidance provided by state election officials, citing as an example the Pennsylvania secretary of state's 2020 decision on provisional ballots.

Then-Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar told counties the day before Election Day that voters with defective mail ballots could use provisional ballots. Project 2025 authors said this should have been — and still should be — "investigated and prosecuted."

The Pennsylvania Department of State told PolitiFact that "any accusation that the department has used guidance to circumvent election law is false, and it is well past time to stop arguing over the audited, verified results of the 2020 election. The plans outlined in Project 2025 are a clear attempt to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters."

The Project 2025 proposal is "shocking" and, if pursued, "would surely chill any election administrator from taking action that is, according to Project 2025, unlawful," said Lisa Marshall Manheim, a University of Washington law professor. "Frankly, just having this proposal in this document likely will have a chilling effect."

Manheim said a remedy already exists for disagreements with election administrators: asking courts for an injunction. Criminally prosecuting officials for this reason "does not have precedent," she said.

Since 2020, election officials have faced high staff turnover amid harassment and threats.

Add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census: Trump pursued this as president before dropping it after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked it.

The federal government uses census population numbers to determine how many U.S. representatives a state has. Immigrant rights advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said that adding the citizenship question would reduce response rates among immigrants, including those who are U.S. citizens.

A 2019 Census Bureau paper found that adding the citizenship question would likely reduce responses of households that include a noncitizen by up to 8%. The bureau pointed to previous research showing that those households might provide inaccurate information, skip the question or not respond; some people don’t answer because they fear their answers will be shared with federal agencies that will use the information against them.

The American Community Survey, the census survey sent annually to U.S. households, includes a citizenship question.

"So if adding a citizenship question is somehow denying voting rights, a ridiculous proposition, then the Biden-Harris administration is engaging in such behavior with its current use of the American Community Survey," Spakovsky said in a statement to PolitiFact.

Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said 2% of American families receive the American Community Survey, rather than everyone, so it can be statistically adjusted. Having the question on the survey isn’t the same as the census, which is a count and not a sampling.

What is Trump’s plan?

We don’t know which Project 2025 provisions a Trump administration might apply that could affect voting protections.

Trump has made promises about election practices that are in state, not federal, laws, such as  requiring voter ID at the polls, even though most states already require it, and promising paper ballots, although most Americans already use them.

As president, he emphasized investigating voter fraud during his 2016 campaign. He also formed a commission to investigate voter fraud, but it disbanded without proving his claims.

Our sources

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Project 2025 and voting rights: Fact-checking Kamala Harris ad

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