In 2016, Florida investigators charged a lawyer named David Michael Levin with three felonies. The accusation: he used a cyberattack to obtain login credentials, then got into restricted parts of the Lee County elections office website, and separately accessed the Florida Division of Elections site.

Levin pleaded guilty. The felonies were reduced to two misdemeanors. He served 20 days in jail — on weekends — and got two years of probation.

At his plea hearing he called it a "silly political stunt." Years later, he explained it differently: he had been curious about the integrity of elections.

Ten years later, the Justice Department appears to have hired him to do exactly that, with a badge.

Where he turned up

Democracy Docket reported that Levin took part in the Justice Department's election monitoring operation during Minnesota's August primary. He was photographed at a Minneapolis polling site, standing next to William F. Mohrman, a senior counsel in the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section.

Democracy Docket identified him from images and video posted online, using publicly available facial-recognition reverse image search. The Justice Department did not respond when asked to confirm his employment or his title.

Let that settle. The Civil Rights Division's Voting Section is the office that enforces the Voting Rights Act. It is the part of the federal government whose entire job is protecting people's ability to cast a ballot. And a man with a conviction for illegally accessing election systems was standing outside a Minneapolis polling place with one of its senior lawyers.

Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket put it this way: hiring Levin "would be among the most troubling examples yet" of a Civil Rights Division that has been bringing on lawyers — including the acting chief of the voting section itself — "who have taken extreme steps to undermine fair elections."

Why this fits a pattern

If this were one odd hire, it would be a story about vetting.

It isn't one odd hire. It is the same government that has spent this year doing all of the following:

• Demanding states hand over their voter rolls, and threatening the officials who say no. We wrote about how the DOJ began threatening to jail election officials over noncitizen voting — a problem that essentially does not exist.
• Firing the entire Election Assistance Commission, the agency that certifies voting machines. We covered that here.
• Holding federal anti-terrorism money hostage to force states to change how they run elections. FEMA's 2026 grant notice withholds 20% of the $1.064 billion Homeland Security Grant Program until a state proves it has complied.
• Manufacturing the fraud crisis in the first place. The evidence never showed up, so the crisis was built on purpose.

Now the same department is sending monitors into polling places in Democratic-leaning cities, and at least one of the people it sent has a criminal record for getting into election systems he had no right to be in.

What "election monitoring" is supposed to be

Federal election monitoring has a real and honorable history. The Justice Department has sent observers to polling places since the 1960s, and the reason was the Voting Rights Act: Black voters in the South were being turned away, intimidated, and cheated, and the federal government showed up to watch and to document it.

Monitors were there to protect voters from officials who wanted to stop them voting.

What is happening now inverts that. The department has said it will target Democratic strongholds for monitoring. The stated concern is fraud that repeated investigations have not found. And the people carrying it out include lawyers who, by Democracy Docket's account, have taken extreme steps to undermine fair elections.

A federal agent standing at your polling place is not neutral furniture. It changes how people behave. For voters who are immigrants, or who have a record, or who have simply been told for years that the government is looking for a reason to question their ballot, a stranger with federal authority waiting outside the door is a reason to turn around and go home.

That's not a side effect. It is the entire point of intimidation, and it works whether or not anyone gets charged with anything.

The question nobody at DOJ will answer

Democracy Docket asked the Justice Department a simple thing: does David Michael Levin work here, and in what job?

No answer.

That is worth as much as any of the rest of it. A department that believed it had made a defensible hire could say so in one sentence. Instead a man convicted of illegally entering election systems shows up beside its voting-section counsel at a polling place, and the department that is demanding transparency from every county clerk in America has nothing to say about its own staff.

Americans are entitled to know who the federal government is sending to watch them vote.

Source

Trump DOJ Hires Lawyer Convicted of Election Hacking to Voting Rights Division: Report — Common Dreams, August 21, 2026, reporting on Democracy Docket's exclusive.