PolitiFact: Fact Checking Kamala Harris’ Ad Targeting Black Americans

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Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, warned in an ad that the 2025 Project, a conservative guide to presidential policy recommendations, would hurt black Americans, including at the polls.

“Project 2025 Agenda Trump would give him unchecked political power with no safeguards,” read a television ad that began airing in early September, targeting black Americans in key battleground states. “And it would set black America back. Project 2025 would strip us of voting rights protections.”

The ad did not include any quotes or explanations for the voter protection claims. When we asked the Harris campaign for evidence, it pointed to specific pages in the 2025 Project about the Justice Department, voter fraud and the U.S. Census Bureau. (This is not a Trump campaign document.)

READ MORE: PolitiFact FL: Fact Check Kamala Harris’ Interview with National Association of Black Journalists

The 2025 Project calls for more aggressive enforcement of anti-fraud laws; whether those changes will restrict Black Americans from voting is speculative. The project document provides few details about its voting rights recommendations, making it difficult to find expert consensus on the implications for voting access.

The ad is different from others that have broadly attacked the 2025 Project because it speaks directly to black voters, said Andra Gillespie, an Emory University professor and expert on African-American politics. Harris is using the ad to mobilize black voters, who polls show have shown greater interest in the presidential election since Harris displaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.

Turnout among black Americans, typically a left-leaning voting bloc, could play a major role in the election’s outcome. Harris campaigned in key battleground states with significant black voters, including Georgia and Michigan.

Amid criticism of Project 2025, former President Donald Trump distanced himself from the document, which the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote with input from conservative groups. But Trump has strong ties to the foundation. In 2022, when Trump gave the opening remarks at a Heritage event in Florida, he said the organization would “lay the groundwork and lay out the detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming.”

At least 140 people working for the Trump administration were involved in the 2025 Project, a CNN analysis found.

Project 2025 Proposals
Harris’ campaign cited three elements of Project 2025 as evidence to support its claims of disenfranchising Black Americans: a reorganization of the Justice Department, an investigation of state election officials and adding a citizenship question to the U.S. census.

Trey Grayson, a Republican and former Kentucky secretary of state, said it “seems far-fetched to say that these three proposals would strip black Americans of legal protections.” (Grayson has criticized election fraud promoted by some Republicans.)

Reorganization of the Department of Justice: The Project 2025 document states that the U.S. Attorney General should transfer prosecution of violations of one part of American law from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division.

Experts disagreed on the impact of the proposed change.

When any presidential administration changes party control, it is normal for the Justice Department to change direction, Grayson said. But the protections are still there.

Jonathan Diaz, director of voting rights advocacy at the Campaign Legal Center, an organization that advocates for expanding voting rights, said the proposed change “reflects an emphasis on restricting voting access by aggressively criminalizing voting behavior,” rather than balancing enforcement of election crime laws with laws that protect voting rights.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said: “Harris may believe that moving enforcement of some election violations from the Justice Department’s civil rights division to the criminal division would make enforcement decisions less favorable to minority interests overall. There’s a lot of debate on the merits of such a reorganization.

“But neither of those elections would disenfranchise anyone.” (Olson called Trump’s claims about non-citizens voting and liberals’ claims about restricting voting “false.”)

Hans von Spakovsky, who directs the Heritage Foundation’s voting rights initiative and is a former Justice Department official under former President George W. Bush, said that even under Project 2025, the Justice Department’s civil division would continue to enforce federal laws such as the Voting Rights Act. But the criminal division would handle criminal cases. Von Spakovsky has spent decades alleging widespread voter fraud, despite evidence from courts, scholars and journalists that U.S. elections are secure.

Examine state election guidelines: The 2025 Project calls on the Department of Justice to examine voting guidelines provided by state elections officials, citing as an example the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s 2020 decision on provisional ballots.

Then-Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar told counties the day before Election Day that voters with defective absentee ballots could use provisional ballots. Project 2025 said that should have been — and still should be — “investigated and prosecuted.”

The Pennsylvania Department of State told PolitiFact that “any allegations that the department used the guidelines to circumvent election law are false, and it is long past time to stop arguing about the verified results of the 2020 election. The plans outlined in Project 2025 are a clear attempt to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters.”

Project 2025’s proposal is “shocking” and, if implemented, “would certainly discourage any election administrator from taking the actions that Project 2025 says are unlawful,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, a law professor at the University of Washington. “Frankly, just having that proposal in the document would probably have a chilling effect.”

Manheim said there is already a remedy for disagreements with election administrators: asking a court for an injunction. Criminal prosecution of officials for this reason is “unprecedented,” she said.

Since 2020, election officials have struggled with high staff turnover, harassment and threats.

Add a citizenship question to the U.S. census: Trump sought to do this as president but backed away from the idea after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked it.

The federal government uses census data to determine how many U.S. representatives a state has. Immigrant rights advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said adding a citizenship question would lower response rates among immigrants, including those who are U.S. citizens.

A 2019 U.S. Census Bureau study found that adding a citizenship question would likely reduce responses from households with a noncitizen by up to 8%. The bureau pointed to previous research that shows such households may provide inaccurate information, skip the question or not answer at all. Some people don’t respond because they fear their answers will be shared with federal agencies that could use the information against them.

The American Community Survey, a census survey of American households conducted every year, includes a question about citizenship.

“So if adding a citizenship question somehow disenfranchises voters, which is an absurd assumption, then the Biden-Harris administration is engaging in that behavior with its current use of the American Community Survey,” Spakovsky said in a statement to PolitiFact.

Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said that 2% of American families receive the American Community Survey, not everyone, so it can be statistically adjusted. Asking a question on a survey is not the same as a census, which is a count, not a sampling.

What is Trump’s plan?
We do not know which provisions of Project 2025 the Trump administration may implement that may impact voting rights protections.

Trump has made promises about voting practices that are covered by state law, not federal law, such as requiring voters to show ID at the polls even though most states already require it, and promising paper ballots even though most Americans already use them.

As president, he emphasized investigating election fraud during his 2016 campaign. He also established a commission to investigate election fraud, but it was disbanded without proving his claims.