PolitiFact FL: Fact check on Kamala Harris' ad targeting Black Americans

WLRN partners with PolitiFact to fact-check Florida politicians. The Pulitzer Prize-winning team strives to present the real facts, uninfluenced by interests or biases.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, warned in a commercial that Project 2025, a conservative guidebook containing the president's policy recommendations, would harm black Americans, including at the ballot box.

“Trump's Project 2025 agenda will give him unfettered political power without any protections,” said the TV ad, which aired in early September and was aimed at blacks in swing states. “And it would set black America back. Project 2025 would take away our right to vote protections.”

The ad did not include any quotes or explanations of its voter protection 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. (It is not a Trump campaign document.)

READ MORE: PolitiFact FL: Fact check on Kamala Harris' interview with the National Association of Black Journalists

Project 2025 calls for more aggressive anti-voter fraud efforts. Whether these changes would limit Black Americans' voting rights is pure speculation. The project document provides few details about its voting rights recommendations, making it difficult to find expert consensus on the consequences for voting access.

This ad differs from others attacking Project 2025 broadly because it appeals 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 election since Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the ballot.

Turnout among African-Americans, who are typically a left-leaning voting bloc, could play an important role in the outcome of the election. Harris has campaigned in swing states with significant numbers 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 input from conservative groups. But Trump has close ties to the foundation. When Trump delivered a keynote speech at a Heritage event in Florida in 2022, he said the organization would “lay the groundwork and lay out detailed plans for exactly what our movement is going to do and what your movement is going to 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 working for the Trump administration were involved in Project 2025.

Proposals for Project 2025

To support their claim that black people in the United States are being disenfranchised, the Harris team cited three elements of Project 2025: reorganising the Justice Department, investigating state election officials and adding a citizenship question to the US census.

Trey Grayson, a Republican and former Secretary of State of Kentucky, said it was “over the top to say that these three proposals would strip black Americans of their legal protections.” (Grayson has denounced the election fraud claims spread by some Republicans.)

Reorganization of the Department of Justice: The document “Project 2025” states that the US Attorney General should shift the prosecution of violations of certain areas of US law from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Justice Division.

There were differing opinions among experts about the impact of the proposed change.

When a presidency changes party leadership, it is normal for the Justice Department to change direction, Grayson said. But there are still protective measures in place.

Jonathan Diaz, director of the voting rights division of the Campaign Legal Center, an organization that advocates for expanding voting rights, said the proposed change in policy reflects “an emphasis on restricting voting access through aggressive criminalization of voting behavior” rather than balancing enforcement of anti-voter crime laws with laws protecting voting rights.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said: “Harris may believe that shifting prosecutions of certain election violations from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division will result in overall prosecution decisions being less favorable to minority interests. It's fine to argue about the merits of such a restructuring one way or the other.”

“But neither option would disenfranchise anyone.” (Olson has called Trump’s claims about non-citizen voting rights and liberals’ claims about voter suppression “nonsense.”)

Hans von Spakovsky, who heads the Heritage Foundation's Voting Rights Initiative and formerly served in the Justice Department under former President George W. Bush, said the Justice Department's civil division will continue to enforce federal laws such as the Voting Rights Act under Project 2025, but the criminal division will handle cases involving criminal provisions. Von Spakovsky has claimed for decades that there is widespread voter fraud, even though courts, academics and journalists have proven that U.S. elections are secure.

Investigating state voting policies: Project 2025 calls on the Department of Justice to investigate the voting policies provided by state election officials, citing the Pennsylvania Secretary of State's decision on provisional ballots in 2020 as an example.

Then-Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar notified counties the day before Election Day that voters with flawed mail-in ballots could use provisional ballots. The authors of Project 2025 said this should have been — and should continue to be — “investigated and prosecuted.”

The Pennsylvania Department of State told PolitiFact that “any allegation that the Department used policies to circumvent election law is false, and it is past time to end the dispute over the audited, verified results of the 2020 election. The plans outlined in Project 2025 are a clear attempt to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters.”

Project 2025's proposal is “shocking” and, if pursued, would “deter any election official from taking actions that Project 2025 says are unlawful,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, a law professor at the University of Washington. “Frankly, just the fact that this proposal is in this document is likely to have a chilling effect.”

Manheim said there is already a remedy for disagreements with election officials: You can go to court and ask for a restraining order. Prosecuting officials for this reason “has no precedent,” she said.

Since 2020, election officials have faced high staff turnover as well as 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 the census to determine how many U.S. representatives a state has. Immigrant rights activists, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said adding the citizenship question would reduce the response rate among immigrants, including U.S. citizens.

A 2019 U.S. Census Bureau report found that adding the citizenship question would likely reduce responses from households where a noncitizen lives by as much as 8%. The bureau pointed to previous research showing that these households may provide inaccurate information, skip the question, or not answer; some people do not respond because they fear their answers will be shared with federal agencies that could use the information against them.

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

“So if adding a citizenship question somehow constitutes a denial of the right to vote – a ridiculous proposition – then that is exactly what the Biden-Harris administration is doing 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 only 2% of all American families receive the American Community Survey, not all of them, so the survey can be statistically adjusted. Having the question in the survey is not the same as the census, which is a count, not a sample.

What is Trump's plan?

We do not know which provisions of Project 2025 that a Trump administration might implement could affect election security.

Trump has made promises about voting practices that are enshrined in state law, but not at the federal level. For example, he may require voter ID at the polls, even though most states already require it, and he promises paper ballots, even though most Americans already use them.

As president, he placed great emphasis on investigating electoral fraud during his 2016 election campaign. He also established a commission to investigate electoral fraud, but it disbanded without being able to prove his allegations.

Copyright 2024 WLRN Public Media