WASHINGTON—For at least the last six years, Donald Trump has been claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Now, with less than a month to go before the 2026 midterms, the president is overseeing—if not orchestrating—schemes to steal this one.
Trump plans to control the results of the elections in just over three weeks from now include deputizing the military and the FBI to “guard” polling places in the name of an unjustified “national emergency to prevent non-citizens from voting.”
For those who think that this scheme is so outrageous as not to be believed, one need only go back to the elections held when Trump was president the first time around. He actually called an emergency meeting at the White House to push for using the military to seize voting machines in districts where he did not like the election results. Cabinet members and others dissuaded him from doing so. This time he is surrounded by sycophants who would not push against any such plan.
He has, in interviews with the press, not ruled out using the Insurrection Act as a pretext to declare a national emergency. Presumably the “insurrection” he is talking about would, among other things, involve attempts by immigrants, on an organized basis, to illegally vote in the election. There have never been any major examples of immigrants trying to vote illegally in U.S. elections.
In addition to having the FBI and/or the military “guard” election polling places to “protect” us from a national emergency, the administration has explored and is ready, former Trump officials and civil rights groups say, to seize voting machines and ballot boxes after the voting has happened.
This too was an option discussed but halted by people in the first Trump administration who are not around this time.
And this time Trump would send ICE agents and the Border Patrol to enter into polling places, including grabbing people out of voting lines on the suspicion that they’re undocumented. For those who think this too is just too outrageous to believe, one has only to note how ICE grabbed people off the streets during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago and as it did and is still doing in Minneapolis-St. Paul. There have been more than enough dress rehearsals for this in U.S. cities already, including the National Guard placements in Washington, D.C.
The NAACP and the ACLU have noted that no one should be surprised if voters of color are among those grabbed by ICE or federal agents when they try to vote. At the very least, talk of plans like that are likely to depress the vote ahead of time.
And on September 25, the Supreme Court’s six-justice GOP-named majority helped Trump via a ruling making it tougher for people to vote, two years from now. The ruling said, among other things, that it will be ok to demand proof of citizenship from voters, even though that would not take effect until 2028. Experts say disinformation about that decision could scare people away from the polls on November 3.
And of course, there’s the ultimate disenfranchisement weapon, which the High Court blessed earlier this year in a redistricting case from Louisiana: Gerrymandering.
By splitting up communities of color and throwing those voters into white and MAGA-dominated congressional districts, it effectively disenfranchised them in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama.
All of this is designed to cement GOP control of Congress and enhance Trump’s dictatorial power by neutering the opposition. For Trump and the GOP, who are losing badly on issues of the economy, gasoline prices, inflation, and Trump’s Iran War, throwing foes out of the polls is absolutely necessary if they are to win.
It also plays into the wants and needs of much of the 1% and the corporate elite, who are threatened economically by a mass voter revolt in the election.
Trump has made himself the center of the voting even more than other presidents ever have.
The results have been a disaster for the Republicans. Trump’s purge of party members who crossed him has backfired, producing competitive races even in red states—such as Texas, Kansas, and Alaska—where there were none before.
Trump’s ratings with voters are so far in the tank that they rival the depths of disgust with Richard Nixon at the end of Watergate, and they’re dragging down GOP candidates nationwide.
This has not only sent Trump out to campaign but also prompted him to hatch schemes to save the GOP majorities on Capitol Hill. According to various sources, including the Associated Press and civil rights groups including the ACLU and the NAACP, which are suing in federal court, they include:
- A draft Trump executive order declaring a national emergency “to counter alleged foreign interference in elections by requiring strict voter ID procedures, accelerating voting roll purges, banning mail-in ballots, and getting rid of voting machines in favor of hand-counting all votes.”
- Sending troops, especially ICE agents, to big and Democratic-run cities to intimidate voters and challenge and even drag away those who look Hispanic. The ICE agents, plus the FBI, have been authorized “to operate in and around polling places,” the Associated Press says. Voting rights organizations are suing in federal court in D.C. for injunctions to stop the troop movements.
“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” former top Trump aide Steve Bannon, who is still close to the White House, sneered in a podcast earlier this year.
- In the wake of last year’s ICE sweeps in Chicago—Operation Midway Blitz—Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned there could be a rerun this fall. His warnings were viewed as far-fetched. Local officials, citing Trump actions, now take them seriously, the Chicago Tribune reported on October 1.
Illinois Secretary of State Kwame Raoul, the top state elections official, meets weekly with county elections officials on measures to protect voters and ensure they can cast ballots safely, securely, and without federal troops swarming them. One idea: Having attorneys at the polls ready to seek injunctions should ICE interfere with voters. Another: Dispatch local police to arrest offending ICE agents.
- At a roundtable on elections during a conservative conference earlier this year, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Adviser-designate, suggested seizing the ballot boxes after the vote. He uttered that same suggestion after the 2020 balloting.
- Trump regime War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in late September that the National Security Agency “and other military intelligence and cybersecurity forces will guard election systems during the midterm balloting.” The given reason, for the last nine years, is that election systems are “critical infrastructure.”
The supersecret NSA usually monitors and decodes foreign military and cable traffic, but it has also been known to gather telephone number logs of domestic callers and monitor hackers.
It’ll get the election task because one federal subagency Trump’s firings gutted was the cybersecurity and infrastructure security branch of the Homeland Security Department. It lost 1,000 workers and $10 million to trillionaire Elon Musk’s chainsaw.
- The latest, and maybe the most worrisome development is the September 25 Supreme Court ruling.
The High Court’s unsigned majority opinion, by the six GOP-named justices, expanded the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, maintained by the Homeland Security Department, to include Social Security records, too. The combined database would be used to determine whether people are eligible to vote.
The League of Women Voters, represented by Democracy Forward’s lawyers, sued to stop the SAVE idea. They said not only did Homeland Security promulgate the program without required public notice or comment, but that a test, in one Texas county, showed SAVE had a 21% error rate on whether people are citizens or not.
The Trump regime “recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” their lawsuit said.
The GOP-named Supreme Court majority rejected the lawsuit on September 25. SAVE stands and 27 states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Indiana, will use the SAVE database.
“If the modified SAVE program”—which would have a person’s full name, birthdates, Social Security number, and citizenship status—“is unable to confirm that an individual is a citizen, the agency is required to contact the individual and request he provide proof of citizenship to register or remain registered to vote,” the justices ruled.
- Election experts, and even the court majority, said the SAVE ruling came too late to affect this election and that SAVE allows only mass voter purges. But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, leading the three High Court dissenters, said that just hearing about approval of the SAVE list—and its impact—could confuse and intimidate potential voters.
“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Justice Jackson wrote. Democratic presidents nominated all three dissenters.
Other election experts said nothing in the court’s ruling, or in the two-decade-old Motor Voter Act, could prevent red states from using those SAVE databases to purge voters one by one—and then aggregate all the tossed-out voters together.
- Celina Stewart, the League of Women Voters president, noted an unidentified whistleblower had come forward, two weeks before the court’s ruling, saying federal workers were pressured “to fabricate evidence and falsely claim citizens as criminals” ineligible to vote.
“The power of government must never be used to manufacture suspicion, silence dissent, or, as reported, create false justification for investigations. Yet these reports suggest an effort to further fuel unfounded narratives about our elections while placing eligible voters at risk of intimidation and government scrutiny,” said Stewart.
- States, cities, and counties run elections, a point the justices and others repeatedly make. But Trump supporters have taken over state and local election boards, notably in rural Nevada, and could use those positions to skew voting reports.
- Elections also need ballot counters and poll watchers—800,000 of them nationwide. After widely publicized Trumpite threats to two African-American women during the 2020 Georgia statewide ballot recount, there’s now a shortage of volunteers to fill those positions. No poll watchers opens the way for more intimidation.
The Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University proposes solving the intimidation and repression problems through three proposed laws. The Freedom to Vote Act “would protect voting rights, end partisan gerrymandering, close campaign finance loopholes, and shore up the electoral process,” it says.
Congress and state legislatures should also outlaw the mass purges the Supreme Court majority legalized in its SAVE decision.
And a federal Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Act would outlaw voter disinformation and intimidation such as sending ICE to the polls or surrounding vote counters with officers armed with guns, as happened in Phoenix, Ariz., during that statewide 2020 count.
- Opinion columnist Bill Blum wrote in Common Dreams on October 2 that “if all else fails,” and voters elect a majority-Democratic House, Senate or both, outgoing House Speaker Mike Johnson, D-La., an election denier, could refuse to swear in the Democrats. He’s the Speaker until noon on January 3.
And Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, as the constitutional President of the Senate, could deny the oath of office to newly elected Democratic senators. Vance stays in that vice presidential chair until noon on Jan. 20, 2029.
Vance wasn’t in Congress in 2021 when most Republicans voted against certifying Biden’s win over Trump, in balloting delayed for at least 12 hours by the Jan. 6, 2021, Trump-backed invasion and insurrection in the U.S. Capitol. But later that year, while running for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, Vance became a 2020 election denier and has maintained that stand, agreeing with Trump.
Asked by CNN in May if he would recognize this fall’s results, Vance hedged.
“Sure, if it’s a free and fair election, I will accept the results standard, whoever wins,” Vance said. Trump previously defined a “free and fair election” only as an election he wins.
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