An internal letter obtained by The Associated Press says that the Justice Department unit that makes sure voting rights laws are followed will now focus on looking into voter fraud and making sure that elections are not harmed by “suspicion.”

The new goal statement for the voting section briefly talks about the historic Voting Rights Act, but it doesn’t talk about how the law is usually enforced, like making sure that lines on legislative maps don’t separate voters by race or protecting people’s right to vote. Instead, it changes the unit’s job to fit the conspiracy theories that Republican President Donald Trump has been spreading to try to hide the fact that he lost the 2020 race to Democrat Joe Biden.

At the time, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, said there was no proof that the election was fixed on a large scale. Many recounts and audits, including some led by Republicans in key states where Trump said he lost, confirmed Biden’s win and found that the election was run correctly. A lot of court cases that Trump and his backers tried to overturn the election results were also lost.

But in Trump’s second term, Pam Bondi is attorney general. She helped him try to get back the election he lost in 2020. Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican Party lawyer and long-time friend who has also repeated some of Trump’s false claims about voting, was chosen by the president to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which is home to the voting section.

Stacey Young, who worked for the Department of Justice for 18 years and left the Civil Rights Division days after Trump’s inauguration in January to start Justice Connection, an organisation that helps agency employees, said, “The Civil Rights Division has always worked to make sure Americans can vote and that their votes matter.” “It is not the division’s job to spread the false idea that widespread voting fraud is common just to get votes.”

The department did not answer when asked for a statement.

Trump already showed that he wants to use the Justice Department to go after people who spoke out for the 2020 election by ordering the investigation of one of his former appointees who publicly backed up the safety and correctness of the 2020 vote count.

The purpose statement for the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division says, “Our goal is to make sure that elections are free, fair, and honest, without any fraud, mistakes, or suspicions.”

It also says that the unit will “vigorously enforce” Trump’s order to change the way elections are run. A judge has put some parts of that order on hold.

The executive order, which was signed late last month, says that people must show proof of U.S. citizenship every time they register to vote. It also says that all mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day, which is against the law in 18 states, and tells the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency, to change its rules for voting machines.

A number of law experts say that a lot of the order is against the Constitution because states and, for federal races, Congress are the only ones who can decide how elections should be run. The Constitution doesn’t say that the president can decide how votes work.

The voting unit’s new purpose statement also says that its main goal will be to make sure that “only American citizens vote in U.S. federal elections.” Not being a citizen already makes it illegal to vote. When people register to vote, they have to swear that they are U.S. citizens. If a noncitizen tries to vote, they can be charged with a crime and deported.

Multiple investigations have shown that out of the hundreds of millions of votes cast in recent elections, only a very small number were cast by people who are not citizens, often by chance. Before it was overturned by the judges, Kansas had a rule that 31,000 eligible U.S. citizens could not register to vote because they had to show proof that they were citizens.

Republicans, including Trump, have said over and over that there must be a lot more people who aren’t citizens voting, and they want to make it harder for them to do so.

Notably, the roughly 200-word statement on voting rights talks about fighting “fraud” twice and looking into “other forms of malfeasance.” Fraud in the voting process is already looked into and prosecuted by the Department of Justice, but in a different criminal division. The voting area is a civilian part of the police force that doesn’t look into possible crimes.

But from now on, the statement says, it will “protect the right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated.” It wasn’t clear what that meant. There have been no common cases of votes being counted wrong.

As President Joe Biden’s senior policy assistant for democracy and voting rights, Justin Levitt said that the voting rights section’s power is severely limited by the specifics of civil rights laws and what judges will agree to. This is because the voting rights section does not go after prosecutions.

It’s important for courts to buy what the civil part of the Civil Rights Division is selling, he said.