DOJ had big plans for Eric Neff as Acting Chief of the Voting Section—the office charged with protecting Americans' right to vote. Neff was tapped to compile a national voter database to identify non-citizen voters, Social Security numbers and all, to share with the Department of Homeland Security. States that balked at cooperating would need to be pressured to turn over their voter rolls. And that required Neff’s talents as a seasoned trial lawyer.
But his seasoning left a bad taste. Back in 2022, as a Los Angeles County prosecutor, Neff got a hot tip from True the Vote that a tiny Michigan software company was funneling poll worker data to the Chinese Communist Party. Wow! He charged the company’s CEO with embezzlement. Neff was onto The Big Story.
Bummer. Six weeks later, the case collapsed. Neff got sent home on leave. The CEO sued over the bogus charges, and LA County had to pay the guy $5 million and declare him innocent. Ouch.
Seems that the tip came from the same True the Vote that proclaimed the 2020 election was stolen but then, under penalty of perjury in court, had to admit that it never found any evidence of fraud in Joe Biden’s election.
Whoopsies.
But that track record didn’t deter Trump’s DOJ from putting Neff in charge of voter fraud. Perhaps it even proved his ideological fitness for the task.
So how’s that going?
In Rhode Island, a judge—a Trump appointee—asked Neff if DOJ had any actual evidence of problems with the state’s voter rolls. Rather than answer, Neff named a law about racial discrimination.
So, no?
He also assured the judge that the DOJ hadn’t started digging into the voter data already in its hands. Then he filed a note to “correct and clarify the record.” Turns out, it had.
The judge tossed the case as a “fishing expedition.”
But to be fair, Neff’s a busy guy, suing state after state. So busy that he blew the deadline to formally notify Washington state it was being sued, mailing the papers to the wrong addresses.
“Counsel apologizes to the Court,” Neff wrote, assuring the judge that his team had properly served every other state. Except, it seems, Massachusetts, where somehow his team happened to make the same error.
Oops.
