Trump Is Still Trying to Undermine Elections

So far, it’s a tossup which of the Trump Administration’s wrecking balls will prove most destructive: the one that accelerates global warming, the one that abandons our allies, the one that torches the economy, or the one that compromises public health. Yet all of these are distractions from the President’s long-standing pet project: decimating free and fair elections. It may be that we have become so accustomed to hearing Donald Trump’s false claims about rigged elections and corrupt election officials that we have become inured to them, but in the past seven weeks he has pursued a renewed multilateral program to suppress the vote, curtail the franchise, undermine election security, eliminate protections from foreign interference, and neuter the independent oversight of election administration. And, as with the rest of Trump’s calamitous agenda, he is doing it in full view of the American people.

Consider Trump’s remarks during his first Cabinet meeting: “We have to get to honest elections. We have to go back to paper ballots. We have to go back to voter I.D. One-day election, ideally, or short-term—not these forty-eight-day and sixty-one-day elections, where boxes are put in a room and, ‘Oh, let’s move the boxes because we’re putting in a new air-conditioning system.’ Then you see the boxes move and then you say, ‘Well, where are all the boxes? You know, what happened to the boxes that never came back?’ Now our elections are extremely dishonest.” This from a man who won the popular vote, all the swing states, and the Electoral College, and who bragged to the Republican Governors Association, on February 20th, that his victory was so decisive that the outcome was “too big to rig.” (In the next breath, he suggested that, even so, the Democrats must have cheated, because “we only won by millions of votes. We should have won by a lot more than that.”) As Marc Elias, an elections lawyer who litigates on behalf of Democrats, told me, “When Donald Trump says that he does not believe there should be voting machines, you should believe him. When he says there should only be voting on Election Day, you should believe him.”

Now that Trump has installed a surfeit of election deniers throughout his Administration—Vice-President J. D. Vance; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, and Attorney General Pam Bondi (both of whom, in their confirmation hearings, refused to say that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election); the deputy F.B.I. director, Dan Bongino; White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—the President has been busy dismantling the guardrails protecting voting and voters. On February 6th, two weeks before the governors’ meeting, it was reported that Trump had fired the chairman of the bipartisan Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, dismissing her with a letter stating simply, “You are hereby removed as a Member of the Federal Election Commission, effective immediately. Thank you for your service on the Commission.” Weintraub is a vocal Trump critic, who served as one of three Democrats on the commission, alongside three Republicans, but the F.E.C. is an independent agency, created by Congress to enforce campaign-finance rules. In her role as chair, Weintraub rebuked Trump in 2019, when he said that he might accept foreign intelligence on his opponent without informing the F.B.I., and again in 2020, when he claimed that mail-in voting would promote widespread fraud. Trevor Potter, a former Republican chair of the F.E.C. and the president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, wrote, “In claiming to fire a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, the president violates the law, the separation of powers, and generations of Supreme Court precedent.” He added that the F.E.C.’s commissioners “are confirmed by Congress to serve the vital role of protecting the democratic rights of American voters. As the only agency that regulates the president, Congress intentionally did not grant the president the power to fire FEC commissioners.”

Less than two weeks later, Trump issued an executive order that states, “No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law.” In plain language, this mandate cancels the independence of independent agencies and, in the context of the F.E.C., gives the President the ability to make and adjudicate campaign rules to his advantage. The Democratic National Committee, along with the Democratic Congressional and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committees, is now suing Trump and Bondi’s office, on the ground that the order violates federal law, but for now it stands.

Trump also has been talking about taking over another independent agency, the U.S. Postal Service, which he does not have the authority to do. His hostility to voting by mail is well-known: during the first Presidential debate of 2020, for example, he claimed that voting by mail would cause “fraud like you’ve never seen,” an assertion he repeated during an appearance on “Dr. Phil” a couple of months before the 2024 election. Control of the Postal Service could offer additional ways to undermine elections, perhaps by raising the price of postage, so that the cost to the states of mailing ballots would be prohibitive, or by banning the automatic mailing of ballots to voters.

Meanwhile, Trump, with the help of Elon Musk’s DOGE, fired some hundred and thirty employees of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), of the Department of Homeland Security. Among other things, CISA monitors and reports on foreign interference in our elections: think China, Iran, North Korea, and, especially, Russia. (Around the same time, Bondi disbanded the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force, in order to “end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion”—a not so subtle dig at those who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election and beyond.) For years, Republicans have claimed that the agency was using its authority to combat misinformation and disinformation as a way to collude with social-media platforms, to censor Americans. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, stated in her confirmation hearing that CISA “has gotten far off mission” in monitoring misinformation and disinformation, and her deputy Troy Edgar, told the Senate that CISA needed to be “reeled in.” (It was a point of pride for Noem that, when she was governor of South Dakota, she refused to take a seven-million-dollar cybersecurity grant from D.H.S.)

But CISA also supplies—or used to supply—state election officials with computer-monitoring equipment to help them “harden” their election systems against outside intrusions. The bipartisan National Association of Secretaries of State wrote in a letter to Noem on February 21st, in advance of a review she was conducting of CISA, that the assistance of the agency is crucial to helping guard elections from cybercriminals and foreign attacks. Steve Simon, the Minnesota secretary of state and the current president of NASS, told me that “election security is national security, and that’s not just what we say. That’s what the federal government has said over three Presidential Administrations.” The review was completed in early March, but it will not be released to the public. Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the news site CyberScoop, “Without transparency on the agency’s plans, [states] are left scrambling to prepare for upcoming elections.” He went on, “If CISA is abandoning them, election officials deserve to know—keeping them in the dark only helps bad actors.”

Trump’s efforts to undermine elections are also being aided by Republicans in Congress who are pushing for the adoption of a piece of legislation called the SAVE Act. In the estimation of Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, “the SAVE Act would be one of the worst voting laws in congressional history.” The bill, which is being characterized by its sponsors as a way to insure that noncitizens do not vote in federal elections, would, in fact, codify obstacles to voting. For a start, it would require documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote—such as a passport or a birth certificate that matches one’s legal name.