WASHINGTON, DC – President Donald Trump has long been obsessed with how voting in the United States is administered, claiming without evidence that his loss in the 2020 presidential election was the result of fraud.
Fast forward more than five years, and Trump is set to take office in one of the most important midterm elections in recent memory.
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It is unclear how the U.S. president will interact with the midterm elections, which will determine whether Republicans maintain control of both houses of Congress.
The outcome will determine whether Mr. Trump can continue to enact his agenda with relative ease, or whether he faces repeated opposition from Congress.
Michael Traugott, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, said there appear to be two elements to Republican leaders’ approach thus far.
Meanwhile, President Trump has launched a messaging campaign to cast doubt on the supposedly unfavorable results.
“Part of what the Trump administration is doing is trying to create an impression of fraud and mismanagement in local elections so that they can ultimately say that some results are not legitimate, are not real, or should be ignored,” Traugott told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, President Trump also appears to be conducting a stress test of existing election laws to determine the extent to which the federal government can intervene.
“There are actions he could take or would take, but they would probably be blocked by the courts,” Traugott said.
He added: “The Trump administration’s action is to appeal, appeal, appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.” “I think that’s their strategy.”
Calls for “nationalization” of election management
President Trump has made it clear in early February that he wants to strengthen the federal government’s control over elections, saying, “Republicans should nationalize voting.”
He said there was “horrible election corruption” in some parts of the United States.
The U.S. Constitution gives each state the power to determine the “time, place, and manner” of elections for federal offices.
Parliament, on the other hand, has the power to “create or change” rules related to voting through legislation or, in extreme cases, through constitutional amendments.
“It’s important to remember that we don’t actually have national elections in the United States; we have state and local elections one after the other, held on roughly the same day,” Traugott explained.
The president, on the other hand, has no constitutional role in determining how elections are conducted other than signing legislation passed by Congress.
Still, it is possible for the president to leverage executive branch agencies that interact with state election administration. Mr. Trump also clearly blurs the line between federal and state power.
“The states are agents of the federal government in elections,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on February 3. “I don’t see why the federal government wouldn’t conduct elections anyway.”
His comments were quickly condemned by voting rights groups.
The League of Women Voters, a voting rights group founded in 1920, called Trump’s comments “a calculated effort to dismantle the integrity of the voting system as we know it.”
It added: “The President’s claims of widespread fraud have been disproved time and time again by nonpartisan election officials, the courts, and the Department of Justice.”
Despite President Trump’s claims, voter fraud is extremely rare in the United States, and isolated instances usually have little impact on election results.
Even the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that supports the Trump-aligned Project 2025, has documented a negligible rate of voter fraud in a catalog of incidents dating back to 1982.
An analysis by the center-left Brookings Institution found that in the states closest to the elections, fewer than 1 in 10,000 of the total votes cast was fraudulent.
Arizona, for example, is a presidential election battleground state, but since 1982 there have been only 36 reported cases of voter fraud out of more than 42 million ballots. According to our analysis, the fraud rate is 0.0000845.
The Department of Justice pushes the boundaries
Nevertheless, the Trump administration is increasing pressure on the Justice Department to step up its investigation into allegations of voter fraud.
Attorneys general have requested 47 states and the District of Columbia turn over their complete voter registration lists, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy group.
Eleven states have complied or agreed to comply. The Trump administration filed lawsuits against 20 others who refused.
The Department of Justice is also increasing cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security to identify noncitizen voters.
Some critics have even accused the Justice Department of deploying coercive tactics to meet state voter information requests.
For example, on January 24, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz proposing three “common sense solutions” to “restore the rule of law” to the state.
One of those proposals was to give the Justice Department “access to voter rolls.”
Bondi’s comments came after a deadly federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota resulted in two Americans being shot on camera.
Although her letter did not directly offer a quid pro quo of access to the directory in exchange for ending the crackdown, critics said the message it sent was clear. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, for example, denounced the letter as tantamount to “blackmail.”
But four days later, on January 28, the Justice Department went further, raiding an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and seizing voting records and ballots.
The state has been a sore spot for Trump. Georgia voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 election for the first time in more than 20 years.
At the time, Trump infamously pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “get more votes” after his loss. Since then, he has spread rumors about fraud in Georgia’s election system.
Local officials said in the lawsuit that the affidavits filed by the FBI to obtain the search warrant were hypothetical and denounced the January raid as a “clear violation of the Constitution.”
In other words, Fulton County officials argued, they could not establish probable cause that a crime occurred.
The affidavit also revealed that the investigation was a direct result of a referral from Kurt Olsen, who was appointed to the White House role as President Trump’s election security director in October.
Before joining the White House, Olsen led an unsuccessful legal challenge to the 2020 election results in what President Trump dubbed his “Stop the Steal” campaign.
“Multiple courts have sanctioned Mr. Olsen for baseless and speculative claims about the election,” Fulton County officials said in a statement.
What is Tulsi Gabbard’s role?
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s apparent role in the election investigation also raises questions.
Gabbard participated in the Fulton County raid, and Trump later told reporters that Gabbard was “working very hard to keep the election safe.”
But who authorized her presence was the subject of contradictory statements from the Trump administration.
Gabbard said she was sent to represent President Trump despite his efforts to distance himself from the attack. The Justice Department later announced that Bondi had requested Gabbard’s presence. Gabbard said she was ultimately asked to attend by both Trump and Bondi.
In any case, political scientist Traugott said her presence at the scene was highly unusual.
“The Director of National Intelligence has been involved in observation and intelligence gathering from foreign countries rather than from domestic agencies,” Traugott explained. “Historically, this is unprecedented.”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said in a statement that he was concerned that Gabbard was overstepping her authority. He said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, of which he is vice chair, has not been briefed on “foreign intelligence connections” related to the Fulton County attack.
Warner said Gabbard is either shirking her responsibility to keep the committee informed or “guiding the bipartisan intelligence agency she is supposed to lead into a domestic political stunt aimed at legitimizing conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
Gabbard, who is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee in March, responded in early February that she was acting under “broad statutory authority to coordinate, synthesize, and analyze information related to election security.”
She insisted that her office “will not irresponsibly share incomplete intelligence assessments regarding foreign or other malign interference in U.S. elections.”
voter ID law
But executive agencies like the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are not the only ones pushing President Trump’s policies ahead of the midterm elections.
Experts say President Trump is plotting to use the Republican majority in Congress to pass voter-restrictive laws ahead of the November election.
President Trump supports a bill called the SAVE Act, which would require people to submit additional documents, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote, as well as a photo ID to vote.
Rights groups have long argued that such requirements disenfranchise some voters who cannot access such materials. As of 2023, the U.S. Department of State reported that only 48% of U.S. citizens had a valid passport.
The bill would also require states to provide voter lists to the Department of Homeland Security to identify and remove noncitizens, raising concerns about voter privacy.
The bill, which passed the House, will likely face a tough fight in the Senate. Voting by non-citizens is already illegal.
But even without the bill, President Trump threatened to sign an executive order requiring local election organizers to require voter identification before distributing ballots.
President Trump already signed a similar order last March imposing new rules on elections, including voter ID requirements, overhauling electronic voting machines and limiting the length of time ballots can be counted.
Nearly all of the provisions have since been blocked by a federal judge. The latest ruling by U.S. District Judge John Chun involved restrictions such as tying federal campaign finance to “proof of citizenship” requirements.
“In granting this relief, the court seeks to restore the proper balance of power between the executive branch, the states, and Congress as envisioned by the Framers,” Chun wrote in his decision.
