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At a Justice Department briefing on Thursday, Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department has charged close to 300 people with illegal voting and has hundreds of criminal investigations into voting and election fraud still under way — work he said was never going to stop because of last week's midterm results.
Blanche said the department also has "ongoing cases and investigations in various states surrounding voter process." He said the election-integrity work "wasn't expected to stop no matter the results of the election last week."
Asked whether the department had opened new investigations out of last week's results, Blanche said no — with one exception already public: the case out of Alaska, which he said began before the election and "has nothing to do with what happened last Tuesday." The department sued Alaska last month over its Senate ballot and is running a separate criminal investigation tied to the namesake candidacy of Daniel J. Sullivan.
The briefing follows the department's announcement on November 2 that it had charged 63 people in 15 states with illegal voting, fraudulent registration and related election offences — which Blanche called the largest surge of voter-fraud arrests since President Donald Trump returned to office. The department said it had charged 195 noncitizens in 25 states in the nine weeks before that announcement, bringing the total charged with voting-fraud-related offences since the administration began to 239. The charges are allegations; the cases have not been tried.