Legal filing shows there's a new head of the DOJ's voting section. He has ties to conspiracy theorists. Mother Jones illustration; Aaron Schwartz/Xinhua/Zuma
A former Los Angeles County district attorney who was put on administrative leave in 2022 after he based a prosecution around tips from a right-wing group that has promoted election fraud conspiracy theories is now the top voting rights official at the Department of Justice, according to a legal filing reviewed by Mother Jones.
Recently, Eric Neff’s name began showing up in emails to state election officials and on DOJ legal filings, which referred to him as a “trial attorney.” But a new lawsuit filed against Fulton County, Georgia, on Thursday showed Neff got an apparent promotion. The legal complaint, which seeks 2020 ballot and signature envelopes to search for irregularities, refers to Neff as “Acting Chief, Voting Section.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Working as a California prosecutor in October 2022, Neff led efforts to accuse Eugene Yu, the CEO of Michigan-based election management company Konnech, of storing sensitive data about California poll workers on Chinese servers—an alleged violation of his contract with Los Angeles County. The county charged Yu with embezzlement and conspiracy.
Neff’s boss at the time, District Attorney George Gascón, emphasized there was no evidence Yu’s alleged misconduct affected the legitimacy of the 2020 election results, but the charges nonetheless fed into right-wing conspiracies that China was somehow involved in stealing Donald Trump’s reelection. Both Trump and the late Charlie Kirk celebrated Yu’s arrest at the time.
Less than two months later, Gascón dropped the charges because there was “potential bias” in the “presentation” of evidence. According to the Los Angeles Times, Neff’s investigation into Yu was apparently spurred by a tip from one of the co-founders of True the Vote, a right-wing group that has promoted baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen. Neff was placed on administrative leave, and the county subsequently paid Yu $5 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit.
True the Vote is most notable for its false claims about people committing mass fraud in 2020 through ballot drop boxes; Dinesh D’Souza based his now-debunked 2022 film, 2000 Mules, around the group’s work.
Neff’s career advancement comes as the DOJ voting section attempts to compile a national voter roll in a purported effort to uncover examples of voter fraud. As my colleague Ari Berman and I reported last week, Trump and his allies could use this voter registration information to challenge election outcomes, or even to illegally cull voters from voter rolls.
“This administration is abandoning the congressional mandate that the division has to stamp out discrimination and protect vulnerable populations,” Chiraag Bains, a former high-ranking official in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told us. “They’re not just abandoning it. They’re actually weaponizing the power of the federal government to try to cut off access to the ballot.”
