Man accused of double voting in 2020 election says Trump pardon applies to him

Saturday November 29, 2025 · 10:00 AM PST

2025/11/29 · 10:00

no image description available — Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Nov. 7.

Legal scholars say the suspect’s claim is the result of ‘sloppy’ language in the president’s proclamation.

A man charged with voting twice in the 2020 election has adopted a novel legal argument: that he’s covered by the pardon that President Donald Trump granted to allies who attempted to reverse his 2020 election loss.

Federal prosecutors charged Matthew Laiss in September with double voting in the November 2020 election. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania alleged that Laiss moved from Pennsylvania to Florida in August of that year and voted both in person in Florida and via mail ballot in Bucks County. Both votes were allegedly for Trump.

Early this month, Trump issued a pardon to 77 people, including members of his legal team and the so-called fake electors, for their conduct in connection with the 2020 election. However, the pardon proclamation was written broadly, saying in part that Trump was granting “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens” for conduct related to the 2020 election.

Laiss’s attorney argued in a motion to dismiss filed last week that the “plain language” of the pardon meant it extended to Laiss.

Beyond that, the motion cited “the unequivocal absurdity of the notion that individuals like John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Sidney Powell … are explicitly pardoned for their exponentially more egregious alleged conduct, while a then-26-year-old man who cast two votes for President Trump in the general election is not.”

“To read the Pardon Proclamation to intend such an outcome would be outrageous, particularly in light of its sweeping language,” Laiss’s attorney argued.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney declined to comment. The White House Press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Legal scholars warned when Trump issued the pardon that the broad language could have unintended consequences for the administration.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in California and a former Justice Department official, said he wasn’t surprised to see a defendant making this argument.

The pardon was so broad and poorly written, Levitt argued, that it could conceivably apply not just to the allies Trump intended to pardon, but also to people accused of voting illegally in 2020, like Laiss, and to election officials Trump has implied should face prosecution for “cheating.”

The caveat is that the pardon applies only to federal crimes, and election-related crimes are generally prosecuted at the state or local level.

There are other federal cases that may be covered by the pardon. Earlier this year, a Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, man pleaded guilty to multiple counts of election law offenses, one of which occurred during the 2020 election.

Derek Muller, an election law professor at Notre Dame Law School who first noted Laiss’s motion on the Election Law Blog, said it makes sense that Trump issued a broadly worded pardon, given that his allies’ conduct in 2020 and early 2021 spanned a long time frame, crossed multiple states, and involved many individuals. Typically, pardons are tailored to specific people or circumstances.

Even when former President Joe Biden issued broadly worded pardons to his son and members of Congress who served on the committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Muller said, he narrowly tailored the pardons to specific people.

Trump’s pardon “does name individuals, but it does speak to anyone, and it also speaks to a wide range of conduct,” Muller said. “It’s a little sloppier language. With that broad of language, it allows for unintended consequences.”

The U.S. attorney’s office has until Friday to respond to the motion. Ultimately, it will be up to the judge in the case to decide if the pardon applies, Muller said.

A GOP request pushes the limits on federal interference in elections

Votebeat

Wednesday November 26, 2025 · 3:00 PM PST

2025/11/26 · 15:00

There’s little precedent or legal authority for what Michigan lawmakers are seeking from the Justice Department.

By Carrie Levine for Votebeat

Earlier this month, a group of Republican state lawmakers in Michigan sent a letter asking the U.S. Justice Department to “deploy official election monitors and provide comprehensive oversight for Michigan’s 2026 primary and general elections.”

Besides election monitors, which the Justice Department for years has deployed around the country to observe elections, the letter isn’t clear on what the Republican lawmakers mean by “comprehensive oversight,” or exactly what legal authority they believe would allow such an intervention. In interviews with Votebeat Michigan reporter Hayley Harding, two of the letter’s signatories did not go into specifics about what they were envisioning; you can read our full report on the letter here.

President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly pushed for more federal oversight of elections. In March, he issued a sweeping executive order that would overhaul the way elections are administered in many states, though federal courts have since blocked many of its provisions on the grounds that the Constitution doesn’t grant him such authority. His administration is appealing at least some of those decisions.

In August, Trump asserted in a social media post that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt earlier this month said the administration is working on a second executive order on elections. Some conservative allies have suggested Trump could assert emergency powers; many experts have said he cannot.

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) — President Donald Trump, shown in 2024.

Historical precedents for such federal oversight or authority aren’t easy to come by. Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” could only think of a few times — such as during Reconstruction or after the passage of the Voting Rights Act — when the federal government asserted authority to step in and administer an election.

Keyssar (who notes that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was once his student) told Votebeat there was almost no federal involvement in elections before the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. They included the 15th Amendment, which said the right of citizens to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Congress passed the Enforcement Acts to protect those rights, though Keyssar in his book describes their passage as Congress “stretching the limits of its constitutional powers.” For a few years, Keyssar notes, the federal government was actively intervening to protect the rights of Black voters in the former Confederate states against entities such as the Ku Klux Klan.

Federal enthusiasm for such enforcement dwindled after that. Big swaths of the Enforcement Acts were either modified or repealed over the years, and the federal government didn’t do much more about elections until the Civil Rights Movement, Keyssar said. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act — the subtitle of which, Keyssar points out, is “an act to enforce the fifteenth amendment.”

However, some parts of the Enforcement Acts are still on the books. Joseph Nunn, a counsel for the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program who focuses on issues surrounding the domestic activities of the U.S. military, said that includes a provision of what is currently known as the Insurrection Act.

The provision, designed for civil rights enforcement, allows the president in some circumstances to federalize the National Guard and deploy it, or the active-duty armed forces, in a state where a group of people are being deprived of a constitutional right that state authorities are either unable or unwilling to protect, he said.

The provision was used by President Ulysses S. Grant during Reconstruction, Nunn said, and a handful of times during the Civil Rights Movement, including the Little Rock, Arkansas, school integration crisis, but not since that period. Nunn said he believes the Insurrection Act grants dangerously broad powers but wouldn’t allow a president to take over an election.

“The question would be what legal authority does the president have to unilaterally go in and seize control over an election,” he said, adding, “That’s not something the president can do.”

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