With Republicans potentially losing their current seven-vote majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections (or, less likely, their six-vote majority in the Senate), President Trump has been sending clear signals of his intent to interfere with the fairness and integrity of those elections.
After saying in a social media post on Monday that “DEMOCRATS … CHEAT AT LEVELS NOT SEEN BEFORE,” he promised to sign a new executive order aimed at “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” in order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 midterms.” Mr. Trump also promised to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN ballots and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial Voting Machines.” He also claimed that the United States is the only country using mail-in balloting. (In fact, it is used in Canada, Britain and many other countries.) Mr. Trump’s claim that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ of the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” is as legally wrong as it is politically dangerous. That can also be said about his plans to issue an executive order interfering with how states run their elections.
The fear that Mr. Trump will try to subvert the 2026 elections is real — after all, he tried to overturn the results of the first presidential election he didn’t win. But even if Mr. Trump fails to keep the House and the Senate in Republican hands, he will have delegitimized future Democratic victories in the eyes of his MAGA base….
For decades, I argued that the United States should join other modern democracies in having national nonpartisan administration of elections. What we have instead is a hyper-decentralized system that gives states the primary role in running elections, and states in turn give their counties the authority to conduct elections and count ballots. I had thought that the variety of voting rules, machines and personnel was inefficient and particularly dangerous in polarized times, when every local mistake becomes evidence of some claim of a stolen or botched election.
What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles. It is among the many things I had thought about American democracy that have been overturned by the advent of Mr. Trump….
States can serve as the primary bulwark against this attempted election subversion. States are not federal “agents.” They control election systems and can assert their longstanding rights to run elections. This is no longer a red state-blue state issue: Either all states have the power to run elections, despite the president’s make-believe grievances, or none of them do. The Republican Party objected when President Joe Biden issued an executive order to federal agencies to encourage more voter registration. Mr. Trump seeks to exert far greater authority than anything Mr. Biden had in mind.
Courts are the second bulwark against presidential meddling in elections. Federal courts have already issued orders blocking parts of Mr. Trump’s earlier executive order that infringe on state sovereignty. Although courts, including the Supreme Court, have not been strong in recent years on voting rights protection — and things seem poised to get worse on Voting Rights Act enforcement after the court returns in October — so far they have amassed an admirable record in stopping attempts at election subversion. The most recent example was when Judge Richard E. Myers, a very conservative Federal District Court judge in North Carolina, blocked an attempt by a Republican candidate who tried to get North Carolina’s Supreme Court to retroactively change the rules for voter eligibility, after the election, in an attempt to turn his election loss into a win….
n the end, the American people also have a key role to play in pushing back against Mr. Trump’s meddling. People will need the courage to go vote even in American cities that may have federal agents swarming around them. “Voter protection” in recent decades has not meant protection from government-led violence and intimidation, but it may come down to that. Democrats, Republicans and other members of the public should monitor voting procedures, as allowed by state law, to make sure that state and county election officials stand up to federal pressure and do the right thing as they conduct elections and tabulate ballots. Local civic and business leaders need to back our election administrators, who may find themselves subjected to pressures to bend or break the rules. All of this organizing needs to happen now, not next November. To keep us from sliding further into autocracy, it is civil society we must make great again.
This remains true because even if Mr. Trump refrains from trying to run for an unconstitutional third term, he isn’t finished working to manipulate election results in his favor. To counter this, we will have to rely on the resilience of our commitment to democracy, which is far stronger than the rantings of a would-be strongman. Seen in this light, the diversity of our rules for running elections becomes our strength.