Here’s How Trump Will Steal the Coming Elections

< elections|304|| Democrats naively assume a blowout this fall. Trump will make it an obstacle course.>

Donald Trump fears impeachment should Democrats take majority control of the House of Representatives this November. There are a few Republican grumbles about his presidency but nowhere enough for the Senate to then convict and remove him from office. Eight of them would have to join all the Democrats to reach the needed 67% super majority.

Jim Vondruska, New York Times.jpg

Nevertheless, it seems that Mr. Trump is troubled by a third impeachment damaging his reputation. So, he who persistently but falsely calls elections “rigged” and ridden with “horrible corruption” is marshalling every weapon and contrivance to be the one who actually rigs elections.

To know what’s coming, here’s a round-up of the several methods he is employing to minimize Democratic votes. It wraps up in an apocalypse his cohort has already planned, discovered by The Washington Post.

shut out

We can start with gerrymandering, taken to a new extreme. At Trump’s urging, Texas has redrawn its election maps to deliver five more districts safe for Republican candidates. That set in motion a gerrymandering war, with California countering with a referendum to temporarily suspend its redistricting commission so as to engineer five more seats for Democrats. Virginia contemplates doing the same. Indiana notably refused to comply despite Trump’s pleading. Six states have redrawn their maps. No matter the outcome, gerrymandering, which could easily be replaced by agnostic software carving up each state by equal population counts rather than party voting patterns (as we have written of repeatedly), is the most cynical corruptive of what we like to think is our democracy.

ban voting by mail

Even earlier than he did in 2020, Trump is attacking mailed-in ballots with the intention of banning them by executive order. “We’re the only country in the world that uses this type of mail-in ballots”, he lies. Almost three dozen countries permit postal voting.

Those who have economic difficulty going to the polls to vote — they sacrifice pay to get off from work, for example — are thought to be bigger users of mailed ballots. Republican strategists think that describes Black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote Democratic, so taking away voting by mail will discourage them from voting.

That is not admitted, of course. Rather, Trump’ s claim, devoid of evidence, is that mailed-in ballots are rife with fraud.

voter id

Proof of who you say you are in order to vote — colloquially “photo ID” — is very popular. The SAVE America Act, currently working through Congress, requires proof of citizenship, such as your birth certificate or passport, in order to register to vote. It requires that you present that same proof at the polls every time you vote in a federal election. Poll workers will be subject to prosecution should they fail to make these demands.

Almost half of Americans have passports — books or cards but for the rest the $165 for a passport or $65 for a card amounts to a poll tax. Furthermore, an estimated 21 million people lack uncomplicated access to proof they are citizens. That affects voters left and right, but Republican supposition is that it will prevent voting by Democrats in urban centers — Blacks and Hispanics again — with little harm from votes lost in red states where Republican wins are assured.

The Act contains the ban of mail-in ballots that Trump seeks, with exceptions only for illness, disability, military, or out of country. Proof of citizenship will be needed to obtain a mail-in ballot. This is especially problematic for Americans living abroad.

Trump says the SAVE Act is needed to stop illegal aliens from voting. This is nonsense, as checks of voter rolls have shown.
Georgia’s found that 20 of the 8.2 million of the state’s registered voters were not United States citizens; none of the 20 had voted in the 2020 general election. A review of Utah’s approximately 2.1 million registered voters found one “confirmed noncitizen.” Just one. And that one non-citizen had never voted. State after state report much the same.

No less than the Heritage Foundation, principal authors of Project 2025, found only 24 cases of fraudulent voting over the course of the decade they studied.

About why Democrats oppose the SAVE Act? Trump says…

”One reason, because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason. They make up all excuses. They say it’s racist. They come up with things. You almost say what imagination they have. They want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”

It need always be repeated that this is Trump alone, with nothing to support his fabrications, but successfully using repetition to get his followers to believe his lying. He’s gotten 33% of adults believing the biggest threat to safe and secure elections is voter fraud.

The House passed the SAVE bill last year, but it ran aground in the Senate where it needs 60 votes. In this second go-round, Majority Leader John Thune has told Trump he will not end the filibuster in order for Republicans alone to pass it with a simple majority. Trump now says about the SAVE America Act,

“It supersedes everything else…must go to the front of the line. I as president will not sign other bills until this is passed.”

He has said that if the Senate fails to pass it, he will unilaterally make it happen by executive order.

voter rolls

Under the current version of SAVE, all states would be required to remove non-citizens from their voter rolls, as well as submit their unredacted lists to the Department of Homeland Security. In the absence of the law’s passage, the now politicized Justice Department has been suing states to turn over their private voter rolls. So far, 24 states and Washington D.C. have refused to do so, with about a dozen complying.

Just days ago, Ohio’s secretary of state turned in the state’s complete voter registration list with private data about eight million Ohioans without any surety about how the data will be used or shared.

The FBI just executed a raid of Arizona’s Maricopa County that took in “terabytes of data”, estimated one report. Irrespective of a recount that was watched nationally, the Republican-led state senate subpoenaed the data saying it had found “irregularities” in Joe Biden’s 2020 victory by under 11,000 votes,

Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota turn over the personal data in the voter rolls — additional to what the state had already offered, as well as information on Medicaid and food-assistance programs (and repeal its “sanctuary policies”). Governor Walz refused.

The Trump administration has offered no explanation of why it is aggressively pursuing data that belongs to the states nor of its intended use. That it demands personal data says that the newly authoritarian government plans for the U.S. to become a China-style surveillance state. From White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson we get…

“No one should take this Democrat pearl-clutching seriously when they have spent years undermining and denying the results of free and fair elections…President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.”

Democrats cheat and subvert. Believe the lie so as to trust what we’re up to, she says.

What we can expect is that Justice will filter out all Latino/Latina names and challenge the validity of possibly hundreds of thousands in districts where Democratic candidates could win. Trump ‘s personal DOJ will then mandate that before the election every challenged registrant be validated before that individual’s vote can be permitted, a time-consuming task meant to overwhelm already-burdened election workers. Unable to complete the job, this will disenfranchising voters likely to be Democrats.

Mandate by what right? None. But Trump will coerce by denying the federal funding to states that refuse to comply. These extortions will be unconstitutional, but by the time the courts get around to saying so, the elections are over and won’t be undone.

voiding registrations

The purpose of every action we describe is voter suppression with Democrats the target. Red states have been purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls in industrial quantities. If you haven’t voted recently you may show up at the polls and find you’ve been cancelled. If your polling place is open, that is. We can expect closure of polling stations in Black areas to make lines insufferably long so that people will quit or will be turned away at closing time, their vote denied. The GOP will deploy “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots.

nationalization

Trump wants elections to be nationalized because “Our elections are crooked as hell”, he says, absent justification. Boasting that he has accomplished so much, he mused, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

The Constitution reserves everything having to do with elections to the states:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

The executive branch has no role in elections and no rights.

Nationalization, in defiance of the Constitution, is needed because of non-citizens casting ballots, thinks Trump. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally”, he said — a lie on both counts. On a podcast he said Republicans should…

“nationalize the voting process…should say ‘we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least, many, 15 places’”.

With Congress members standing behind him at a bill signing, he voice a novel theory:

“If a state can’t run an election I think the people behind me should do something about it, because, you know, if you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do ’em anyway. The federal government should get involved…. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

For Trump, losing — whether his or an endorsed candidate – means votes were counted illegally and dishonestly. He told NBC News he will only accept the results of the 2026 midterm elections if they are “honest”, that if he believes they aren’t, then “something else has to happen.” Only he gets to judge.

To podcaster Dan Bognino he said,

“We have states that are so crooked and they’re counting votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win.”

So many Americans know so little about their country and its democracy that in a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll a difficult-to-believe 23% think the federal government should take over election administration and vote-counting in certain states.

nationalization by other means

The ranks of ICE will be hugely expanded in the coming months. They amount to Trump’s private army. Dressed in camo and full battle kit, there will be plenty of them to be deployed to voting places throughout the country to “secure elections” but in fact to intimidate Latino voters to stay home or risk deportation.

It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place. The Brennan Center for Justice assures us that whereas a presidential declaration of an emergency – Trump’s go-to justification for giving the slip to the Constitution – unlocks 137 different laws, none gives the president authority over elections. Not even the Insurrection Act.

But we hear of Justice Department and Home Security apostles holding meetings to discuss sending armed law enforcement to monitor voting places anyway; 73% of Republicans are in favor. ICE agents or National Guard troops would be in position to seize voting machines and ballots if undesired candidates are in the lead, a move Trump considered in 2020. (Looking back, he recently told The New York Times, “Well, I should have.” )

The raid by the FBI of the Fulton County (Atlanta) repository of voting records which saw the FBI haul off hundreds of boxes of ballots with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard mysteriously in attendance has not been explained. All three of Georgia’s 2020 vote recounts — and by three different methods — were found to be extraordinarily close in number, but Justice will likely invent something as pretext for November’s key elections. Was Fulton County a dry run for ICE or the Guard to raid voting places and make off with ballots with claims of fraud?

You’d think so to hear House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt say Gabbard is “committed to ensuring a United States election can never, ever be rigged again”, as if it ever has been.

Apocalypse Now

But if all these maneuvers show signs of being insufficient, Trump will not be deterred. The Washington Post has reported that pro-Trump activists working with the White House have produced a 17-page draft executive order for taking over the state elections. The scheme claims that China interfered in the 2020 election is the basis for a national emergency, that assumed Chinese interference in the coming elections warrants declaration of an emergency “that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting”, says the Post. Why 2020 and not the 2022 midterms or the 2024 presidential? Because Chinese intrusion caused Biden’s win, you see, and they’re pretending to prevent China from doing it again.

Peter Ticktin is a New York Military Academy classmate of Trump’s, and now a Florida lawyer who is promoting the executive order draft. (He had in 2022 filed a lawsuit against Democrats for alleging that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia). The Post quotes Ticktin saying…

”But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

The emergency would empower the president to ban mailed ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference. Trump, who has railed against mailed-in ballots for taking too long after Election Day to count, wants paper ballots, which if everyone must use will take much longer, but they make wholesale cheating possible which machines prevent.

So there you have it — the nationalization that Trump and his myrmidons are planning for us. There is no one to inhibit him. He is free to break the country and toss the Constitution into the trash. After all, didn’t the Supreme Court reward him with immunity?