Donald Trump’s administration has run into dozens of roadblocks in his attempts to seize control of federal elections.
The Department of Justice has lost more than 20 court cases in its attempts to vacuum up voter data. Federal courts have repeatedly struck down his executive orders restricting mail-in ballots and implementing national voter ID policies. Congress can’t get behind his sweeping SAVE America Act. Nothing has come from the FBI’s seizure of election materials in Georgia except tired conspiracy theories.
Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was fueled by a false narrative that the previous election was rigged against him, vowing retribution for his supporters who believe the entire process of election administration is corrupted by fraud, immigrants, foreign adversaries and Democratic officials.
That long-term project — eroding trust in elections and the people who run them to then take control of the process — has opened the door for Trump and his allies to launch a bad-faith campaign in pursuit of “election integrity” that has taken root across the Republican Party.
Trump, now desperate, is staring down the final days before midterm elections with the prospect of Republicans losing control of Congress and, with it, his final years in office. Democrats are floating plans to investigate and impeach him and his Cabinet. He’s running out of time and options to do what he has failed to do in court and in Congress over the last decade.
The Supreme Court could save him
Federal courts have repeatedly blocked the president’s sweeping executive order that sought to create a national voter registration list that would be used to decide who is eligible to cast a ballot.
It’s the Constitution, not the president, that determines how states run elections.
His administration has twice asked the Supreme Court to step in and stop vote-by-mail. A decision from the justices to let the president implement far-reaching restrictions on ballot access, without enough time for eligible voters to make sure they weren’t wrongly rejected, “would be chaos,” according to dozens of election officials who ask the Supreme Court to reject the president.
“The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme,” nearly two dozen state attorneys general wrote to the court. “Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting — especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas — would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised.”
The administration has not yet appealed to the high court any of the 21 court decisions that blocked the Justice Department from trying to access voter data.
The government’s “efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them,” Pennsylvania Judge Cathy Bissoon recently wrote. At least five of the judges who rejected the administration’s lawsuits were appointed by Trump himself.
The administration claims it needs those records to ensure that states are adhering to federal laws that require voter registration records be up to date and accurate. But the Justice Department’s lawsuits also appear to threaten mass purges of voters from those lists while officials launch a crusade against noncitizens discovered on state voter rolls.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also threatened election officials with criminal charges if they don’t comply with the administration’s campaign.
He hasn’t ruled out an emergency
Trump has not dismissed the idea of declaring a national security emergency to unilaterally enforce his takeover of federal elections. On Monday, Real America’s Voice host Wayne Allyn Root suggested the president declare an emergency to unilaterally enforce voter ID measures and other sweeping changes to election administration without congressional approval.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK,” Trump replied. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Voting rights advocates, election officials and Democratic lawmakers have long feared the idea coming from a president who is increasingly unmoored from traditional institutional guardrails, close advisers or congressional checks and balances to restrain him.
“Illegal and unconstitutional. Republicans have no interest in democracy when democracy gets in their way,” Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee wrote in response to Trump’s latest remarks. “They know what’s coming in November and they are terrified.”
Trump also could threaten to use federalized troops or law enforcement to seize voting equipment or ballots, which would disrupt ballot collection and vote-tallying and insert a hunt for alleged fraud to satisfy his conspiracy theories.
It’s not a new idea for the president. Following the 2020 election, Trump reportedly considered a similar plan proposed by his allies, which he ultimately never followed through. Now he regrets that he didn’t.
“Well, I should have,” he told The New York Times in January.
Asked whether using the military to impound voting machines was even a viable option, he suggested the National Guard wasn’t “sophisticated enough” to launch such an operation.
“You know, they’re good warriors. I’m not sure that they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats, and the way they cheat, to figure that out,” he said.
A pressure campaign to grind down election workers
Last month, Trump abruptly pushed out the three remaining members of an independent agency tasked with supporting election officials, leaving the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission effectively paralyzed weeks before election day.
Once behind-the-scenes public servants, election officials are increasingly on the frontlines of conspiracy theory-fueled threats.
An annual poll of election workers from NYU’s Brennan Center of Justice found at least 38 percent experienced threats, harassment and abuse because of their job, with more than 60 percent of those threats delivered in person. More than half of all election workers say they fear for their safety — and the vast majority fear the consequences of federal cuts to election security and a debilitating lack of state and local resources.
Instead, the Trump administration has gutted both the commission responsible for supporting those workers as well as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which safeguards against potential cyber attacks, while launching a crusade against the people who ran the election Trump claims was rigged against him.
In April, the Justice Department obtained a grand jury subpoena seeking the names, addresses, email accounts and phone numbers of thousands of election workers and volunteers who worked the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia.
Last month, a federal judge blocked the request, calling it an “unreasonable” and “staggering” attempt to collect sensitive personal information.
“The federal government is targeting Americans who serve voters in their communities every election, and in particular those who served in the middle of a global pandemic,” David Becker, director of the Center for Election Integrity and Research, said in a statement shared with The Independent.
“There is absolutely no legal basis for the DOJ’s demands, and the court was right to put a stop to this unjustifiable fishing expedition,” he added.
