Meet The Lone US Attorney Leading Trump's Non-Citizen Voting Crusade

[DonViejo]

By Allegra Kirkland
February 22, 2019 6:00 am

There’s nothing to suggest that non-citizen voting was ever a pet interest of Bobby Higdon’s.

During the almost quarter-century he spent as a federal prosecutor in North Carolina, Higdon’s main priority was drug crimes. In his subsequent brief stint in private practice at a Raleigh firm, he focused on white collar criminal defense. But since becoming U.S. attorney for the Eastern District in September 2017, Higdon has led the crusade against non-citizen voting. No other U.S. attorney in the country has been as aggressive in pursuing non-citizen voting cases.

Rather than unearthing mass, intentional ballot fraud by undocumented immigrants, Higdon has turned up fewer than two dozen cases in which poll-worker or voter misunderstanding or error caused someone to vote who shouldn’t have done so.

North Carolina attorneys and voting rights advocates told TPM they’re dismayed that prosecutorial resources are being devoted to this non-issue. But there’s no simple explanation for why Higdon, among all 93 U.S. attorneys in the country, has been at the vanguard on non-citizen voting.

“Bobby has always been a diehard, unapologetic conservative Republican and proud of it,” a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked alongside Higdon in the Western District told TPM. “He also doesn’t care whether what he’s doing is popular or not. He feels very committed to using the power of the US attorney’s office in an aggressive way if he feels it is the ‘right’ thing to do.”

Higdon, the attorney added, favors a “scorched-earth” approach to prosecutions and sees the world through a “very stark political lens”: “It’s good/bad, black/white.”

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